Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Perseus or Pugilist? A ND now I wonder would you care JL3L at all to know what fills for me at times the void occasioned by the absence of the open fire? An inexpensive picture. That is all. And only a photograph at that. I think it cost me about $2.50 originally. I bought it, along with its two companion-pieces, in a little shop in the Via Sistina, many years ago, and will tell you frankly that the group attracts not half as much attention hanging over my study door as do other prints upon the walls. There is a little etching, for instance, of Chateau Thierry, showing the old bridge over the Marne, that is full of meaning now to all Americans. There is another of the ancient " Street of the Clock" in Rouen, that appeals unfailingly to my imagination. Then there is a really nice example of Hedley Fitten's handiwork hanging just behind me as I write. It talks by the hour of Guelph and Ghibbeline, Cellini and Boccaccio; of all the wealth of song and story that the fair city of the Arno poured out into the world. The Loggia dei Lanzi in old Firenze! Then, too, a softly tinted rare old view of Windsor Castle sometimes calls for comment. But the masterpiece, the presiding genius of the little room of which I speak, my Perseus, is seldom noticed; save by some dreamer of dreams—some visionary non-conformist probably like myself. I know little enough about art in any technical sense. But I know its power. I can feel its presence. We know that it forms the connecting link between ourselves and the universe of which we are all a part, and that the subtle something for which it stands effectively promotes the aspirations of mankind for something more than food and drink. We know that unnumbered thousands see or care for little apparently beyond mere creature comforts. We know that...