There is no ostentation displayed in the furnishings of the Bryan residence. The parlor is the parlor of the well-to-do middle class. The sitting room is simply furnished, but home-like and inviting. The library is the workshop and no unnecessary tools are lying about. On the walls hang large portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, and steel engravings of Benton, Webster, and Calhoun. They are inexpensive pictures, but typical of the ideals of the occupants of the room. Another picture shows Henry Clay, addressing his colleagues in the United States Senate. The artist’s perspective was sadly at fault, but it was not the art, but the subject, that attracted Mr. Bryan. The library is an extensive one, but unique in its character. Fiction and the classics find very little room. In their places are histories, orations, works on political economy, lives and speeches of famous men, who have helped build the nation of the past, dissertations and addresses upon the hundred and one questions that have vexed and still perplex the modern school of statesmanship. Upon few of these has any dust accumulated, and upon all of them are the unmistakable signs of frequent usage. The characteristic that strikes the visitor most is the _bon homme_, the _camaraderie_, of the household. A wholesome sympathy seems to be the bond that unites all members. Neither the father nor the mother is a strict disciplinarian. They do not believe in tyrannizing over their children. They believe in encouraging their respective bents, and in guiding them in the right channels, rather than in forcing in the ways hallowed by tradition. Mrs. Bryan is essentially a home body; her husband and children are her chiefest, but not her only cares. She is a mentor to them all. Miss Ruth is much like her father in temperament. She is quick and impulsive, warm-hearted and generous. Her popularity among her girl friends is attested by the number that throng her lawn every evening. William is a sturdy youth in build, and, boy-like, more self assertive than his sisters. As his father is a typical American man, so is the youth a typical American boy, fun-loving and possessed of a harmless mischievousness that often disturbs the young girls who are his older sister’s confidantes. Grace, the youngest, is delicate in health, and her father’s favorite. It is to him she goes with her childish troubles, sure of the sympathy that never fails her.