Some Boston Memories

( Originally Published 1912 )

THE Malvolio of cities sick of its own self-conceit ! " Thus Barrymore, with Bohemian prejudices, described it in one of those epigrams which spurted from him like sparks from a squib. And Boston keeps its good opinion of itself in facing the world and resents disparagement, conscious as it may be — conscious or sub-conscious as it must be — of the changes which are effacing its old distinction. As in Edinburgh, the authors who gave it fame have gone without replacement. It has lost its ancient peace, its dignity, its seriousness, like nearly all the rest of the world. Its new generation has no better manners and no finer tastes than have other places. A few old people of placid mien and benevolence, high-minded and al-truistic, remain, but they are as ghosts, with hardly more of earth about them than the smell of lavender.

Such people seemed to preponderate in the Boston I caught glimpses of in the early seventies, a town unraided by grafters and unpinnacled by skyscrapers. Soothing in its orderliness, its hotels were like the sarcophagi of Egyptian kings, and its business was done in rows of solemn-faced granite buildings two or three stories high; its modest dwellings were gathered within a mile's radius of Beacon Hill, with Commonwealth Avenue just beginning to emerge from the shallows of the Back Bay, to dip its feet like a cautious bather, as it were, without too much confidence in what it was doing in that direction.

It was rigidly respectable and justified in its high opinions of itself; everybody was polite and intelligent; even the policeman raised his hand and said "Sir" or "Madam" to you when you spoke to him. Its atmosphere was that of an old-world seat of learning, decorous, unprecipitate, calm. Howells has caught it to perfection in the first chapter of "A Woman's Reason." One got the impression of the repose and intellectual self-possession of an Oxford or a Cambridge released from traditional impediments and occupied with the present and future instead of the past; a place full of inquiry and glowing desires and aspirations. The giants held their own, and to the Saturday Club came Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes and their friends.

Even then Boston was fond of clubs. Robert Grant once said to me, "Whenever a man finds he is having a good time in Boston he forms himself into a club." The Saturday was founded at the same time as the Atlantic Monthly, but though some of its members were contributors to that magazine there was no connection between the two. The Saturday, as Doctor Holmes described it to me in a letter, "met at half-past two in the afternoon to accommodate the members who came from Concord, and each paid for his own dinner and that of any friend whom he introduced. Longfellow sat at one end of the table and Agassiz at the other. There were no by-laws or rules, except those governing elections, and there was neither 'speechifying' nor formality of any kind. Few literary men of eminence have ever been allowed to pass through Boston without being entertained by the Saturday Club; and at its table were to be found, besides those already mentioned, Hawthorne, Motley, and Sumner.

"There was and is nothing of the Bohemian element about it," the "Autocrat" added, "but it has had many good times and not a little good talking. We never had a Bohemia in Boston, and we never wanted it."

But the "Autocrat" was wrong. The Papyrus was in existence even then. A curious unpublished little book lies before me, which was written, I think, by George F. Babbitt. It is called "A Primer of the Papyrus," and it explains that club with much simplicity. There are two classes of members, literary and non-literary, and the question, "What is the difference between them," is answered in the "Primer," as follows: "Well, Sonny, a Literary Member fetches only ten dollars, while a Non-Literary Member fetches twenty-five dollars — unless the Man who proposes your Name is up to Snuff." Then there is a picture of an Egyptian temple, with a sphinx grasping a bottle of champagne, at the portals, and this is accompanied by the following description: "Do you see this Magnificent castle? The front entrance is guarded by Sphinxes and Things and the Reed Immortal is cultivated in the Back Yard. It is the Papyrus Club House, and it is located in the air. The Non-Literary members furnish the Building and the Literary members furnish the Air. The Art Gallery contains the Busts of all the Ex-Presidents of the Club. If you pay your Dues regularly and have the Custody of the Returns, perhaps You can go on a Bust some day Yourself." Article II of the constitution reads as follows: "The object of this club shall be to promote good fellowship and literary and artistic tastes among its members," which is thus annotated in the audacious "Primer": "See this nice sentence. It is a Choice Ex-tract from the Constitution of the Papyrus Club. Is it not a Beautiful Paragraph? It was built to test the after-dinner Punch with. If the sentence can be shouted with Ease then the Punch is Bad. But if the Sentence cannot be Shouted with Ease then the Punch is Good. Is it not a Great Invention? Let us all go and Shout ! "

When I joined the Papyrus, Dr. Frank A. Harris was its president. A physician by profession, his best medicine was his own cheery disposition and unflagging wit. Few could hold their own in fence with Aldrich, but Frank Harris proved himself to be a worthy rival at a luncheon I gave at Ober's one afternoon. Aldrich in his best form was provocative, Harris on the defensive at the beginning, wary and deferential, a little doubtful of his abilities to cope with such an adversary. Boyle O'Reilly was there too, and the altogether charming Nugent Robinson, a visitor from New York, man of letters and man of the world, the dreamer of iridescent Utopias which never solidified, the millionaire of to-morrows which never came. But the rest of us were silent and content to 'watch and listen and laugh : it was like the sword play of two masters of fence, swift as flashes of light, and it went on without fatigue till the afternoon drew in and the waiters began to set the tables for dinner. It was impossible to say which of the two had the advantage in the end; I think it was a "draw."

One day I went to consult Doctor Harris professionally. I had had a call to New York, and felt unequal to the journey. He listened to my own diagnosis with much patience, and, without offering me the prescription I expected, put on his hat and overcoat to go out.

" Come on, " was all he said at the moment.

"Aren't you going to give me something?"

"Yes. Come on."

I thought he was leading me to a chemist's, but instead he took me to the Algonquin Club and seated me at a table.

"Here's the prescription," he said, giving it to the waiter "Oysters on the half shell, clear turtle soup, a broiled grouse, plenty of celery, an omelette and a pint of very dry wine. '

It worked like a charm, and I took the afternoon train in the best of spirits.

He was one of the "medical examiners," who, to the advantage of everybody, had superseded the old-time coroners, and many were his stories of the absurdities of the struggles which had taken place between those antiquated officials, who were paid by fees whenever their services were required. They had chased one another down the streets, and bandied abuse on the way, in their efforts to be first on the scene of the tragedy and thus able to claim the fees. They had fought over the body itself.

I was absent from Boston for twelve years, and when I returned some of its charm had already gone, through deaths, commercial expansion, and political decadence, but Holmes, Lowell, Parkman, and Aldrich survived.

I had written an article about Doctor Holmes which pleased him, and he paid me the compliment of saying, "It is written as one gentleman should write of another." He gave me the privilege of calling on him at his home on Beacon Street, and in summer I was occasionally invited to his cottage at Beverly Farms —"Poverty Flat," he called it, because, as he said, it was close to Pride's Crossing, the name of the next station to Beverly Farms, a neighbourhood of many estates much more splendid than his own.

In a letter previous to my first visit he gave me a detailed description of it:

The village of Beverly Farms is remarkable for its great variety of surface, its picturesque rock ledges and bowlders, the beauty and luxuriance of its woods, especially of its pines and oaks, the varied indentations of its shore, and the great number of admirable situations for residences along the shore and on the hills which overlook it.

Driving is the one great luxury of the place. The roads are excellent; they lead to and through interesting villages and open a vast number of fine prospects over the land and the ocean, and, among other frequent objects of admiration, noble old elms in large numbers. There is a good deal of riding as well as driving, and there are ladies among us who follow the beagles as bravely as those who sit astride their horses' backs.

There is an infinite number of pleasant walks, but I do not think there is a great deal of walking. I have never asked the shoemakers, but I doubt if sole leather suffers a great deal with us during the summer. I walk somewhat myself — pretty regularly, indeed — but I meet few people moving on their own feet.

How other persons amuse themselves here I can hardly tell you. I think there is a little gayety among the younger fashionable people, but the atmosphere is not that of Newport or Lenox.

The "meet" for the hunt is the least solemn diversion on which I have looked during my ten or a dozen summers here. A solitary bather splashes in the sea now and then, and I have even seen two or three in a state of considerable hilarity, but the water is cold and the air is cool, and the temptation to disport in the chilling waves is not overwhelming. Still, young persons like it, and a few years ago I liked it well enough myself.

The wind at Beverly Farms blows over the water a great part of the time, and is deliciously refreshing to those who come from the hot city. Delicate persons will be apt to find the climate too cold, and some may be better off on any of our southern shores; but to those of the right temperament nothing can be better than our cool, bracing air.

In short, it is a healthy, quiet, charming summer residence, and deserves all its reputation as one of the loveliest spots on the New England coast. But going there, as going to any country place, you must pack the spirit of contentment and a desire for tranquil restfulness with your clothes and dressing case, or you will not find the happiness you are after.

He was one of the most accessible of men, though one might infer from his books that he was intolerant of all visitors except his closest friends. Seated in an easy chair, facing the Charles River and Cambridge, a view which recalled life-long associations, he would chat through the better part of an afternoon and gently persuade one to stay when one's conscience pricked one with the fear of outwearing a welcome. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man is a matter of indifference to me," he used to chirp, and then launch out into discourses as various and as suggestive as the chapters of "The Autocrat." In part they were serious, but they usually ended with a smile in some unexpected turn of wit or fresh colloquialism. He brought Minerva down from her pedestal, and, yielding to his mood, she danced for him; indeed, I suspect that they winked at each other. Psychology, which was then less in the air and less a by-word of the street than it is now, often came up in his conversation, and if he did not believe in telepathy, he had incidents within his own experience to quote which inclined him to respect its possibilities.

"Only yesterday, he said, "I happened to think of a man I had not seen for twenty years or more. It was here in this very room. A little later I went downstairs, and there, on the hall stand, was a letter from him. A coincidence? I think it was more than that."

Another time he spoke of immortality. He was curled up in his cushioned chair, with his forehead reposing in his palm, and his eyes gazing across the river — which was reddening in the late afternoon — toward Cambridge, where part of his early life had passed.

In a pause my memory reverted to an incident in his boyhood. On his way to school, he, small, delicate, and fanciful, had to pass under a glove-maker's sign — a great wooden hand — which used to swing and creak and fill him with terror. "Oh, the dreadful hand," he wrote, "always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor get to bed — whose porringer would be laid away empty thence-forth, and his half-worn shoes wait until his smaller brothers grew to fit them."

Oh, the dreadful hand, I thought as I looked at him.

"I often think of death, often, as I sit here, but I have no fear of it. No," repeating the word and shaking his head emphatically, "I have no fear of it." Then he relaxed and smiled. "What do you suppose happened the other day?"

He told me that Mr. McClure had called to persuade him to give his views of immortality in a novel form. He was to converse on the subject with a lady author — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps — and an amanuensis was to record what they said. "I wouldn't listen to it. I told him that I would neither be allured nor McClured into such a project. Why, it would be like an analysis of my spinal marrow. They are always offering me jobs, perhaps because of the facility with which I have turned out occasional verses. I have done far too much nonsense of that kind. Yes, that's it," he said, when I reminded him of his own verses:

"Here's the cousin of a king; Would I do the civil thing? Here's the first-born of a queen; Here's a slant-eyed mandarin. Would I polish off Japan? Would I greet this famous man?

Prince or prelate, sheik or Shah? Figaro ci and Figaro la!

Would I just this once comply? So they teased and teased till I (Be the truth at once confessed) Wavered — yielded — did my best."

"When I think of Gladstone and James Freeman Clarke, both born the same year that I was, I feel futile and almost ashamed of myself," he added. "But I like to hear any pleasant things that are said about me. Here is a letter from a girl who says she sleeps with my poems under her pillow. I wonder if she does — but it's delightful to hear it. I like to be flattered; it is one of the sweetest things in the world to me."

He spoke with the innocence and simplicity of a child.

He was in the eighties then, and was proud of his old age and greatly interested in old men and facts relating to longevity. He admired Mr. Gladstone, and when after a visit to Hawarden I delivered a message from the great statesman to him, he closely questioned me regarding the extent to which Mr. Gladstone was resisting the ravages of time.

" Well, I don't often take stock, " he said with a twinkle, "but the other day I happened to pick up this (a hand-glass) and look into that (a mirror), and I myself was surprised to find a ring of hair on the back of my neck that hasn't turned at all yet. But I feel that it's time to take in sail. Look at my contemporaries — they're all in dock — yes, and some of them pretty deep in the mud, too."

That was a year before he died.

With all his geniality, he was a Brahmin; with all his love of humanity, he was an aristocrat. His consciousness of class and caste was undisguised and quite apparent, and yet he was essentially a Yankee, autochthonous to New England and nowhere else.

Sometimes I saw Whittier at Danvers in the pleasant house called Oak Knoll in which he spent his declining years, a saintly old man who then had almost ceased to write. Writing, he told me, had never been easy to him, even in his prime. "Now I never pick up a pen that it does not give me a headache," he said. In summer you found him oftener in his garden than any other place, plying his hoe or rake among the flowers, watching the antics of the squirrels, or listening to the birds in the overhanging foliage. He was still a student in that "unhoused lyceum, " as he called it, where he learned his first lesson in song. He also told me that "Snow Bound" is in a great measure autobiographical, that it describes what his home life was till he reached his nineteenth year. The various characters described in that poem are portraits, and the house is the house in which he was born. It still stands in Haverhill, and was in possession of the family for more than two centuries; but the long line of ancestors never made a fortune, and all they ever succeeded in leaving their descendants was a good name and a deeply implanted morality of character, moulded according to the Quaker faith in which all of them were nourished.

I became a neighbour of Francis Parkman, the historian, at Jamaica Plain. " Make her plain," the train-hands pronounced it, and a roguish friend of mine, hearing it, used to whisper after a glance at some of the feminine passengers, "Can't make 'em any plainer; no, sir, it can't be done." Parkman was a tall, lean, shy man, long-faced and melancholy, who for many years had suffered from insomnia and alarmed his friends by the huge doses of sulphonal he confessed to. I never knew any one kinder or more sympathetic. He had a wonderful garden on the edge of Jamaica Pond, and there he cultivated his roses more successfully than sleep.

Howells had gone, but almost any day you could meet Aldrich, "a middle-aged young man," as he then called himself, coming around "Brimstone Corner." You might think that, as he was on his way to the Atlantic's office, it would be improper to detain him, but very likely he would press you, if you were a friend, to come in with him and smoke. A winding stairway led into an isolated box no bigger than a ship's stateroom. There were two or three prints and drawings in black and white on the walls, and little furniture besides a couple of chairs, an old brass-handled desk, and a chest of drawers stuffed full of manuscripts. The windows looked out on the rear of the houses in Beacon Street, and on the old Granary Burying Ground, across the gray memorials of which and through a screen of foliage we could see Tremont Street with its procession of jingling horse-cars. And there he would grow confidential, leaning back in his chair, smoking a meerschaum pipe, and twirling a fragile gold chain attached to his eyeglasses, a familiar habit of his. Some-how one always met him with a smile and left him with a laugh. He bubbled like an effervescent wine.

Although for some years we met day after day I had many letters from him, and few that came to an end without some gleam of his touch-and-go humour. He writes to me from his cottage at Lynn Terrace his "sea-shell,"as he called it and says : "I am guiltily employed here in writing a short story for the editor of the Atlantic, if he will accept it," the editor at that time being himself. Then he complains that he is getting "fat and scant of breath — almost as fat as Howells." He liked to believe himself to be overwhelmed with work, though I never knew a more leisurely man. "I am up to my eyes in lyrics and poems and short stories. Look out for them (in order to avoid them) by and by." Then he praises a little story of mine: "If you had remained in England, you would never have learned to write such good English," and another note begins with a quotation from Caxton, printed in a facsimile of the old English black letters: "After dyverse Werkes, made, translated, and achieved, having noo werke in hande I sitte in my studye, where laye many dyverse paunflettes and Bookys."

His study was at the top of his Mount Vernon Street house, and he liked to play the recluse in that sanctum. Nothing was ever to be disturbed there; nothing out of order restored to its proper place. The feminine hand of control visible elsewhere was not allowed to raise itself within that retreat of scholarly abstraction. Things might tumble from the table; they were not to be picked up till wanted, and then only by the recluse himself. The ink might spill; the blot on the table was not wiped off, and in the same way an accident to the mucilage was not followed by the application of any restorative towel. Of course, he worked there seriously enough, but he had to have a little joke with himself. He chose to be as fancy free as he was when a boy in the attic of his old Portsmouth home, where, finding a half-used bottle of hair restorer one day, he diligently applied the contents to one of those old-fashioned, unscraped, cowhide trunks and waited patiently to see the brown and white bristles on it lengthen.

I quote two of his letters to me — the first I ever received from him, with its touch of facetiousness, and the last, that which voices the deep feeling that flowed beneath the sunlit surface:

April 6, 1882.

DEAR RIDEING:

Will you come and take an informal bite with me to-morrow (Friday) at 6 P. M. at my hamlet, No. 131 Charles Street? Mrs. Aldrich and the twins are away from home, and the thing is to be sans ceremonie. Costume prescribed: Sack coat, paper collar, and celluloid sleeve buttons. We shall be quite alone, unless Henry James should drop in, as he promises to do if he gets out of an earlier engagement.

Suppose you drop in at my office tomorrow afternoon about 5 o'clock and I act as pilot to Charles Street. Yours very truly,

T. B. ALDRICH.

DEAR RIDEING:

I knew that you would be sorry for us. I did not need your sympathetic note to tell me that. Our dear boy's death has given to three hearts his mother's, his brother's and mine a wound that never will heal. I cannot write about it. My wife sends her warm remembrance with mine to you both.

Ever faithfully your friend,

T. B. ALDRICH.

John Boyle O'Reilly was another friend of those days.

"Hang you, O'Reilly! You have spoiled the best regiment in Ireland ! " exclaimed Valentine Baker, the colonel, when he arrested him for treason. O'Reilly's adventures after that are known — his transportation to Australia, his romantic escape, and his coming-to Boston in search of any work that he could do. He told me that, first of all, and before he turned to journalism, he sup-ported himself as a fencing master and also gave lessons in boxing. But he was not long in finding his proper place. He who could disaffect a regiment from its allegiance had no difficulty in attaching all sorts and conditions of men to him wherever he went, and he was adored personally, not only among people of his own race and religion, but also where there was little sympathy with Irish sedition or the Catholic Church. He was of his race in the paradoxical contrast of his qualities : amiable, ingratiating, persuasive, but so sensitive that an affront had only to be suspected to inflame him with a passion of resentment and reprisal.

The North American Review published an article on the Irish question, in which Goldwin Smith, in his temperate, measured, and unpartisan way, chose Irish failings rather than English for his argument. It evoked a furious letter of protest from O'Reilly to me, but hardly had the letter reached me when he himself appeared at my office to overwhelm me with vehement apologies out of all pro-portion to the words he wished to recant. He was kindness itself and seemed to make his own any tribulation that was brought to him, his eyes kindling as he listened and a responsive interest spreading over his face in his eagerness to be of service.

Flattery never spoiled him, though it came in many forms and with insidious frequency. He might have had high office in the state had he desired it, but the only use he made of his influence was in the recommendation of his friends, not a few of whom were through him chosen for offices of honour and liberal emoluments, while he remained content, like a true journalist, a power behind a screen, at his editorial post.

On one occasion he asked President Cleveland to give a consulate to a needy literary friend -- expecting that if his request were granted at all the assignment would be to some small continental port worth two or three thou-sand dollars a year. He was as much amazed as the beneficiary was delighted when the appointment turned out three times as good as that looked for — nothing less, indeed, than one of Great Britain's chief seaports. I think that the emoluments from it were almost, if not quite, equal to his own income, and I remember how he laughed when he told me of it, not enviously, but with a relish of what was ironical, rather than humorous, in his achievement.

He had abounding humour; his smile invited you to see the amusing side of what you were doing or relating, when perhaps you, absorbed in it, had not awakened to the latent possibilities of a mirthful turn. He smiled oftener than he laughed, and when he laughed what you heard was a rich, musical chuckle like the low buzz of a 'cello. Yet he may be said to have been a serious man, fervid and quick to feel, with an underlying strain of melancholy in him that came to the surface in the dark, deep-set, expressive eyes which proclaimed his ideality. Physically, he was supple, spare, and symmetrical, an athlete in aspect and in action, with well-balanced features and a brilliant complexion, its clearness and glow emphasized by raven-like hair.

A monument to him stands in a corner of the Boston Fenway, a sufficiently dignified work of art; but I should prefer to see him commemorated in a full-length portrait statue in such a characteristic attitude as we grew familiar with at the Papyrus Club when he was reading his verses; his figure at its full height; his head poised like that of a listening eagle; the manuscript projected in his right hand, while the fingers of the left were hooked in his trousers pocket — the whole expression that of inspiration and exaltation.

Henry Bernard Carpenter, another Irishman, is not to be forgotten. He came to Boston from Liverpool for reasons best known to himself, and though he was the brother of the Lord Bishop of Ripon, and had been in-tended for the Church of England, he joined the Unitarians and preached to delighted congregations in the building 'which is now the Hollis Street Theatre. His eloquence was overwhelming. Listening to him in his rhetorical flights, one had the sensation of being smothered by the odorous and prismatic downpour of roses. Doctrine and dogma received little attention. The spirit mounted and beckoned in ecstatic accents, which it was almost exhausting to follow, and you came away breathless, entranced, and perhaps a little bewildered.

He who had thus moved you was one of the simplest and most human of men, a poet as well as a preacher, a lover of his kind, who reconciled the kingdom of the world with the kingdom of God. He seldom missed the relaxations of the Papyrus, and on Sunday nights gathered his intimates about him for suppers in his rooms in the Hotel Glendon. As fair as O'Reilly was dark, he was nevertheless a type of his race. He spoke with a mellifluous touch of the brogue, quickly, trippingly, with spontaneous humor and wit, and was restless in his solicitude for your comfort and happiness, whoever you might be.

His standards were generous. "There," he said to me one day when we were standing on a Boylston Street corner and a friend was seen approaching, "there's the perfect man — a man with all the virtues and all the vices of his kind. That is what I call the perfect man." A not exacting appraisement, but one practically and eminently characteristic of Carpenter.

Who remembers dear old George Snell, the club's Englishman, Boston's Englishman, the Englishman as he is popularly prefigured everywhere kind, slow, ponderous, who would make speeches and never was able to extricate himself from the web he wove for himself at the outset?

Snell was the architect of the old Music Hall, where I first heard Wendell Phillips and Emerson — Emerson with that fixed, undaunted, seraphic smile, which was never brighter than when he spilt his manuscripts over the stage and took five or ten minutes leisurely to pick up the scattered leaves, beaming all the while on the audience as though it could not be possible for them to miss seeing what an exquisite joke all this was! The old Music Hall, where Anna Dickinson flamed, with real tears in her eyes, against the subjugation of her sex; where Henry Ward Beecher shook his long mane and poured out his strange mixture of eloquence and familiar jocularity; where all the stars of the golden age of the lecture bureau in its prime flashed in turn, with intermissions of oratorios and ballads; where I heard Chris-tine Nilsson, fair as a flower, radiant as a star, sing her first song in America ! What memories of profitable and improving evenings of Victorian propriety and New England inexpensiveness the old Music Hall, that temple of chaste delights and continent intellectuality, brings up !

But I must come back to Snell, to tell a story of him. He lived in the Studio Building, environed by the accumulations of a discreet taste and ample means; he was sufficient to himself beyond other detached men in that he was a gastronomer who had not only a palate and an appreciation, but the gift of gratifying both through his own skill in the kitchen. A cook was superfluous to him; I believe he was prouder of his epicurean talent than of his architecture.

One evening he met Bernard Carpenter and me on our return from a country wedding, and insisted that we should dine with him in his studio, which we were all the readier to do since we had missed our luncheon, and, after trifling with salads and strawberries, were very hungry. His little dining-room would have provoked an appetite had we not brought it with us. Where pictures did not hang against the walls and doors, shelves and cup-boards glittered with silver and Sheffield plate, flagons, decanters, goblets, and smaller glasses of prismatic Venetian and Bohemian elegance. Out . of one window he had built a refrigerator, and behold, within it, a dressed brace of birds, celery, oysters, cutlets ! Out of another window, a compact and ingenious range, heated by gas, which seemed more than equal to anything that could be reasonably expected from it. Every nook had been utilized, and what was not of utility in a narrow sense compelled attention by its beauty.

What a dinner we anticipated here ! And how we praised the taste, the comfort and the ingenuity of the equipment! But our appetites were gnawing and clamouring for "demonstrations" while Snell stuck to theory and made no progress — not even a start — toward relieving our famine.

Eight o'clock struck on the clock at "Brimstone Corner," and, like Jack Tanner in "Man and Superman," he was "still talking." Carpenter's appreciation, which had been rhetorical, drooped now, and he turned to me with the despair of a castaway who finds himself alone on a foodless island. Nine o'clock! and like the farmer with his claret, we were "getting no forrarder."

Somewhere between that and ten o'clock our spirits surged. Still talking heavily to us from the distance, Snell lighted the range and went into another room, and we heard him moving about there for half an hour -- doing what? We were wondering and hoping when he reappeared in the full uniform of a cook — jacket, apron, and flat cap. all of spotless white, the table-cloth across his arm. We stared at him like condemned men who hear that there is no reprieve, for he sat down and renewed his monologue! It was to himself now; we could not speak. In a moment he dozed. "Quick!" whispered Carpenter, tragically. "To the club ! Quick!"

We explained elaborately and apologized profusely when we again met him, and he forgave us for the affront we had put upon his hospitality.

"You missed it, though," he said. "Those birds were delicious."

"When did you eat them?"

"Ah — er — er — let me see. No; not that night. Er — er — the next day."

But we — Carpenter and I — had experienced starvation as poignantly as Jack London ever described it, for it was past eleven o'clock before we found relief at the club.

Another friend of those days, also a Papyrian, was Julius Eichberg, the musician, father of the brilliant lady who is now the wife of John Lane, the publisher. Eichberg was the last survivor of Mendelssohn's orchestra, a picturesque, pallid, and stately man, with a massive, leonine head and a mane of wavy, silvery hair that fell from it like a storm-tossed cascade. Though a German, he spoke English almost like a native, and wrote it even better, with idiomatic raciness. His unpublished reminiscences of Mendelssohn and others, now I believe, in Mrs. Lane's possession, should some day find a welcome in a book. Serious in manner and sonorous in voice, he was apt in graphic phrases. When he met me on my return from my wedding journey he startled me by a question, asked in the deep, solemn, reverberating tones of an inquisitor : " Well, sir, what is it?

A sacrament or a superstition?"

Playful as he was, an unassailable dignity and self-possession shielded him from too much familiarity, even in those who were his intimates.

One night we were dining at the St. Botolph Club, and when pork chops were served as one of the courses Eichberg helped himself to them freely. A well known painter who sat next to him, more injudicious than unkind, exclaimed jokingly, "Here, Eichberg, you musn't eat those. You can't be a Jew if you do,"

Eichberg turned on him in the haughtiest manner, speaking as from a height and from his soul with inflexible pride: "But I am a Jew. The words had an Olympian menace and defiance in them.

A painful silence followed, and, seeing his mistake, the blunderer stammered, "I didn't mean anything. Why, I have Jewish blood in my own veins."

Eichberg faced him, tossed his mane, shrugging his shoulders as he did so, restrained but not pacified. He breathed from a depth that heaved his body as he cast the extenuation aside. Ile spoke with a reverberating inflexion, like a pontiff about to excommunicate. A pause offered no possibility of reprieve.

"You have Jewish blood in your veins? So! But even that does not gonzole me."

And ending, with a sigh of unutterable significance, he froze again.