Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/394

374 house, art was represented by the family portraits, the engraving after Gilbert Stuart's Washington, the illustrated lamp shade, and the Rogers Group. My Father, re-established in a house of his own, displayed an unaccountably liberal taste, straying from the Philadelphia standard to the extent of decorating his parlour walls with engravings of Napoleon he had picked up in Paris—to one, printed in colour, attaching a value which I doubt if the facts would justify, though, as I have never come across it in any collection, Museum, or Gallery, it may be rarer and, therefore, more valuable, than I think. Other fruits of his old journeys to Paris were two engravings, perhaps after Guys, of two famous ladies of that town, whose presence in our prim and proper and highly domestic dining-room seems to me the most incongruous accident in an otherwise correctly-appointed Philadelphia household. When I think of Napoleon replacing Washington on our walls, I suspect my Father of having broken loose from the Philadelphia traces in his youth, though by the time I knew him the prints were the only signs of a momentary dash for freedom on the part of so scrupulous a Philadelphian.

It is curious that illustrations should have as small a place in my memory of home life as of the Convent. The men of the Golden Age of the Sixties had published their best work long before I had got through school, and in my childhood books gave me my chief amusement. But I