“It was in the late seventies, the winter before his passing, that one mild night I walked home from a meeting of the Goethe Club in company with the poet Bryant.  He and my father had been stanch comrades, and many a time had I studied his Homeric head silhouetted by firelight on our library wall.  As we crossed the Park front going from Fifth Avenue east to west, he paused, and leaning on his cane gazed skyward, where the outlines of some buildings, in process of construction on Fifty-ninth Street, and then considered high, stood out against the sky. “’Poor New York,’ he said, half to himself, half to me, ’created and yet cramped by force of her watery boundaries, where shall her sons and daughters find safe dwelling-places?  They have covered the ground with their habitations, and even now they are climbing into the sky.’  And he went on leaving his question unanswered.

* * * * *

“A caller interrupted me yesterday, a most persistent fellow and a dangerous one to the purse of the tyro collector of Americana, though not to me.  He was a man of some pretence to classic education, and superficially versed in lore of title, date, and editio princeps.  He had half a dozen prints of rarity and value had they not been forgeries, and a book ... that I had long sought after in its original form, but the only copy I had seen for many years when put up at auction lacked the title page and fully half a dozen leaves, besides having some other defects.  Would you believe it, Dick, this copy was that from the auction, its defects repaired, its missing leaves replaced by careful forgery, and what is more, I know the vender was aware of the deceit.  But he will sell it to some young moneyed sprig who will not know.

“I was angry, Dick, very angry, and yet all this is a trivial part of what we have a long time been discussing.  The sudden glint of wealth in certain quarters has changed the aspect of even book collecting, that once most individual of occupations, and syndicated it.

“Once a book collection was the natural accumulation, more or less perfect according to purse and opportunity, of one following a certain line of thought, and bore the stamp of individuality; but as these bibliophiles of the old regime pass away, the ranks are recruited by men to whom money is of no account, whose competition forces irrational prices and creates false values.  Methinks I see the finish of the small collectors like ourselves.  Meanwhile, just so much intellectual pleasure is wrested from the modern scholar of small means who dares not make beginning.  I do not like it, Dick, indeed I do not.

“But we were discussing domesticity, I think, when this wretch rang the bell.  The restlessness I speak of as born of undisciplined bigness, of moneyed magnitude, is visible everywhere, and more so in the hours of relaxation than those of business.

“We have acquired the knowledge of many arts in these late years, and we needed it; but we have lost one that is irreparable—­sociality.  There is no longer time to know oneself, how then shall we know our neighbours?