The dining-room with its Japanese dado, and its chairs and table of Austrian bent wood was a particularly pleasant room. Just above the mantel hung a half-finished sketch of an old-time knight balancing in one hand an empty glass, and leaning the other upon an inn table.
An artist friend began the painting with the intention of carrying out an ideal that Garfield had once expressed at a Shakespearian gathering. Dying before the picture was finished, the painter left only an outline of the idea, but that outline, Garfield valued very highly. His love for pictures was almost as great as his love for books, and the walls of this plain little house in Thirteenth Street were adorned with many choice paintings and engravings.
Just over the dining-room was the library where Garfield spent the greater part of his time, when free from congressional duties. In the centre stood a large black walnut office-desk with its accompaniments of pigeon-holes, boxes and drawers, filled to overflowing. Six or seven book-cases, holding in all some three thousand volumes, stood against the walls; and scrap-books of all shapes and sizes confronted you everywhere.
It used to be a common saying in Congress that no man in Washington could stand before the army of facts that Garfield could bring forward at a moment's notice. This readiness was largely due to his systematic course of reading, and his invaluable method of indexing. For instance: if an author's views on some subject struck him as particularly good and worth remembering, he would immediately make a note of it in his commonplace-book, giving with the topic, the volume, and page where the extract could be found. In this manner a rich fund of information was always at hand; his "fruit between leaves" was always ready to gather.
The record of the Congressional Library shows that he took out more books than any other member of Congress; and his reading embraced every variety of subject, history, biography, law, politics, philosophy, government, and poetry.
At one time, during an unusually busy session, a friend found him behind a big barricade of books.
"I find I'm overworked," he said, "and need recreation. Now my theory is that the best way to rest the mind is not to let it lie idle, but to put it at something quite outside the ordinary line of employment. So, I am resting by learning all the Congressional Library can show about Horace, and the various editions and translations of his poems."
Mrs. Garfield showed the same love for the classics as her husband. A year or two ago, he said,—
"I taught my wife Latin at Hiram, and she was as good a pupil as I had. She is now teaching the same Latin to my two big boys."
Mary Clemmer wrote of her:—