Clara and I used to sit on each arm of his chair and listen while he told us stories about the pictures on the wall.
I remember the story-telling days vividly.

They were a difficult and exacting audience--those little creatures.
Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the mantelpiece.

On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various ornaments.

At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life-size--called Emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an impressionist water-color.

Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things already mentioned; also an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all that bric-a-brac and the three pictures.