ONE:"Oh, now you're real mean! No! what she's brought the most of is--guess! You'll never guess it in the world!"
TWO:To the left of the Gothic and inner halls, a very large room had been built out to the demolition of a laurel shrubbery. This was Mr Keelings study, and when he gave his house over to the taste of his decorators, he made the stipulation that they should not exercise their artistic faculties{17} therein, but leave it entirely to him. In fact, there had been a short and violent scene of ejection when the card-holding crocodile had appeared on a table there owing to the inadvertence of a house-maid, for Mr Keeling had thrown it out of the window on to the carriage sweep, and one of its hind legs had to be repaired. Here for furniture he had a gray drugget on the floor, a couple of easy chairs, half a dozen deal ones, an immense table and a step-ladder, while the wall space was entirely taken up with book shelves. These were but as yet half-filled, and stacks of books, some still in the parcels in which they had arrived from dealers and publishers, stood on the floor. This room with its books was Mr Keelings secret romance: all his life, even from the days of the fish-shop, the collection of fine illustrated books had been his hobby, his hortus inclusus, where lay his escape from the eternal pursuit of money-making and from the tedium of domestic life. There he indulged his undeveloped love of the romance of literature, and the untutored joy with which design of line and colour inspired him. As an apostle of thoroughness in business and everything else, his books must be as well equipped as books could be: there must be fine bindings, the best paper and printing, and above all there must be pictures. When that was done you might say you had got a book. For rarity and antiquity he cared nothing at all; a sumptuous edition of a book{18} of nursery rhymes was more desirable in his eyes than any Caxton. Here in his hard, industrious, Puritan life, was Keelings secret garden, of which none of his family held the key. Few at all entered the room, and into the spirit of it none except perhaps the young man who was at the head of the book department at Keelings stores. He had often been of use to the proprietor in pointing out to him the publication of some new edition he might wish to possess, and now and then, as on this particular Sunday afternoon, he was invited to spend an hour at the house looking over Mr Keelings latest purchases. He came, of course, by the back door, and was conducted by the boy in buttons along the servants passage, for Mrs Keeling would certainly not like to have the front door opened to him. That would have been far from proper, and he might have put his hat on one of the brass-tipped chamois horns. But there was no real danger of that, for it had never occurred to Charles Propert to approach The Cedars by any but the tradesmans entrance."It was a clock," he said, slowly, "just like that one, only more so, in a manner of speaking. I mean it 'ad more 'ands and figures, and they was going round very fast. But it 'ad a glass face just like that one, and it was stuck on 'is 'ead just where the back ought to be. The sun was shining on it at first. That's why I couldn't be sure what it was for a long time. But when I looked closer, I could see plain enough, and it made me feel all wobbly, sir."
THREE:"The buildings are arranged to enclose an octagonal space, and consequently a visitor finds himself at the starting-point when he has made the rounds. The affair is in the hands of the gentlemen who controlled the Japanese department of the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876, and many of the features of our Centennial have been reproduced. They have Agricultural Hall, Machinery Hall, Horticultural Hall, and Fine Arts Gallery, as at the Centennial; and then they have Eastern Hall and Western Hall, which the Quaker City did not have. They have restaurants and refreshment booths, and likewise stands for the sale of small articles, such as are most likely to tempt strangers. In many respects the exhibition is quite similar to an affair of the same kind in America; and with a few changes of costume, language, and articles displayed, it might pass for a state or county fair in Maine or Minnesota.
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