Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/264

 poon, picked up, surprisingly cheap, at Nantucket. Its rude shaft was decorated with a pink bow. This was not the doing of the bishop but of his lady. Himself, he said, he preferred the frank, crude, heroic strength of the bare wood, but Mrs. Toomis felt it needed a touch, a brightening—

Set in the rugged chimney of the fireplace was a plaque of smooth marble on which was carved in artistic and curly and gilded letters: "The Virtue of the Home is Peace, the Glory of the Home is Reverence."

The books were, as the bishop said, "worth browsing over." There were, naturally, the Methodist Discipline and the Methodist Hymnal, both handsomely bound, Roycrofty in limp blue calfskin with leather ties; there was an impressive collection of Bibles, including a very ancient one, dated 1740, and one extra-illustrated with all the Hoffmann pictures and one hundred and sixty other Biblical scenes; and there were the necessary works of theological scholarship befitting a bishop—Moody's Sermons, Farrar's "Life of Christ," "Flowers and Beasties of the Holy Land," and "In His Steps," by Charles Sheldon. The more workaday ministerial books were kept in the study.

But the bishop was a man of the world and his books fairly represented his tastes. He had a complete Dickens, a complete Walter Scott, Tennyson in the red-line edition bound in polished tree calf with polished gilt edges, many of the better works of Macaulay and Ruskin and, for lighter moments, novels by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth of the German Garden. It was in travel and nature-study that he really triumphed. These were represented by not less than fifty volumes with such titles as "How to Study the Birds," "Through Madagascar with Camp and Camera," "My Summer in the Rockies," "My Mission in Darkest Africa," "Pansies for Thoughts," and "London from a Bus."

Nor had the bishop neglected history and economics: he possessed the Rev. Dr. Hockett's "Complete History of the World: Illustrated," in eleven handsome volumes, a secondhand copy of Hadley's "Economics," and "The Solution of Capitalism vs. Labor—Brotherly Love."

Yet not the fireplace, not the library, so much as the souvenirs of foreign travel gave to the bishop's residence a flair beyond that of most houses in Devon Woods. The bishop