ONE preeminent figure moving gently for a few years upon the Andover stage, I had almost omitted from the reminiscences of the Hill, ---I suppose because in truth she never seemed to me to be of Andover, or its life akin to hers. I refer to the greatest of American women, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To the stranger visiting Andover for a day, there will long be pointed out, as one of the "sights" of the Hill, the house occupied by Mrs. Stowe during the time of her husband's professorship in the Seminary. After she disappeared from among us, that home of genius met a varied fate. I wonder, do houses feel their ascents and declines of fortune as dogs do, or horses? One sometimes fancies that they may, if only through the movement of that odic force whose mysterious existence science cannot deny, and speculation would not. Next to a man's book or his child, what can be so invested with himself as the house he lives in? Saturated with humanity as they are, who knows how far sentience may develop under observant roofs and in conscious rooms long possessed by human action and endurance?

Mrs. Stowe's house, still retaining the popular name of Uncle Tom's Cabin, became for a while a club devoted to the honorable ends of boarding theologues. At the present time the Trustees' hotel is in the building, which has suffered many dreary practical changes. The house is of stone, and in the day of its distinguished occupant was a charming place. As a house, it is very difficult; but Mrs. Stowe has always had the home-touch in a beautiful degree.

In fact, my chief impression of those years when we had the rich opportunity of her vicinity consists in occasional glimpses of lovely interiors, over which presided a sweet and quiet presence, as unlike the eidolon which Andover Seminary seemed to have created for itself of this great and gracious lady, as a spirit is unlike an old-time agitator. To tell the truth, --- which perhaps is not necessary --- I dimly suspected then, and I have been sure of it since, that the privilege of neighborhood was but scantily appreciated in Andover in the case of this eminent woman. Why, I do not know. She gave no offense, that I can recall, to the peculiar preferences of the place; the fact that she was rumored to have leanings towards the Episcopal Church did not prevent her from dutifully occupying with her family her husband's pew in the old chapel; it was far to the front, and her ecclesiastical delinquencies would have been only too visible, had they existed. A tradition that she visited the theatre in Boston when she felt like it, sometimes passed solemnly from lip to lip ; but this is the most serious criticism upon her which I can remember.

I have since found suspicion blossoming into a belief that the vagueness of arithmetic which led to an insufficient estimate of Mrs. Stowe's value, or at least to a certain bluntness in our sense of the honor which she did to Andover by living among us, sprung from the fact that she was a woman.

Andover was a heavily masculine place. She was used to eminent men, and to men who thought they were, or meant to be, or were thought to be by the ladies of their families, and the pillars of their denomination. At the subject of eminent women the Hill had not arrived. I have sometimes wondered what would have been the fate even of my mother, had she lived to work her power to its bloom. And Mrs. Stowe's fame was clearly a fact so apart from the traditions and from the ideals, that Andover was puzzled by it. The best of her good men were too feudal in their views of women in those days, to understand a life like Mrs. Stowe's. It should be remembered that we have moved on since then, so fast and so far, that it is almost as hard now for us to understand the perplexity with which intelligent, even instructed men, used to consider the phenomenon of a superior woman, as it was then for such men to understand such a woman at all. Let us offer to them the width of sympathy and fineness of perception which they did not always know how to offer to the woman.

My personal remembrances of Mrs. Stowe are those of a young girl whom she entertained at intervals, always delightfully, in the long parlor running the width of the stone house, whose deep embrasured window-seats seemed to me only less wonderful than the soft and brightly-colored, rather worldly-looking pillows with which these attractive nooks were generously filled. There were flowers always, and a bower of ivy made summer of the eternal Andover winters in the stone house; and there were merry girls and boys, --- Mrs. Stowe was the most unselfish and loving of mothers, ---and there were always dogs; big and little, curly and straight; but in some form, dog-life with its gracious reaction on the gentleness and kindness of family life abounded in her house.

It was an open, hospitable house, human and hearty and happy---and I have always remembered it affectionately.

An amusing instance of the spirit of the stone house comes back to me from some faraway day, when I found myself schoolmate to Mrs. Stowe's youngest daughter. This little descendant of genius and of philanthropy was bidden to write a composition ---an order which she resolutely refused for some time to obey. But the power above her persisted, and one day, the child brought in a slip of paper a few inches long, on which were inscribed these words only: "Slavery is the greatest curse of human nature."

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was not written in the stone house at Andover. But there the awful inscription of a great grief was cut into the quivering flesh and blood of a mother's heart. The sudden and violent death of a favorite son ---which made of "The Minister's Wooing" an immortal outcry to mothers bereaved --- occurred, if I am not wrong, while Mrs. Stowe was among us. I never pass the house without thinking what those stone walls have known and kept of that chrism of personal anguish through which a great soul passed in learning how to offer consolation to the suffering of the world.

One of the prettiest pictures which I have of Mrs. Stowe is framed in the everglades of Florida. Her home at Magnolia offered a guest-room in which one could pass a night of such quiet as Paradise might envy. The house, I remember, was built about a great live-oak, and the trunk of the tree grew into the room; the walls being cleverly adjusted to the contour of the bark. Through the open windows the leaves drifted silently, falling about the room, the floor, the bed, as they pleased. One slept like a hamadryad, and waked like a bird in a bough.

Into this nest of green and peace, I had (I remember it with shame and contrition) the hardness of heart and bluntness of courtesy to intrude a pile of proof-sheets. It was my first book of verses. The volume was in press. I was in misery of doubt about the venture. In the State of Florida my hostess was the only accessible person whose judgment could help me; and fate had thrown me on her sweet charity with my galleys. The publishers at the North, a thousand miles away, were hurrying me. There was not a day to lose, if I had made a grave blunder; and I mercilessly read the verses to her, beseeching her advice and criticism.

It would be hard to forget the sweetness, the patience, and the frankness with which she gave herself to my cruel request. I remember how she curled herself up on the bed beside me, like a girl, with her feet crossed under her, and listened gently. The live-oak leaves fell softly about us, and the St. John's River showed in glimpses, calm, coffee-colored, and indifferent, between the boughs. The utter silence of a Florida wilderness compassed us. My own voice sounded intrusive and foreign to me as I read. Nothing could exceed her kindness or her wisdom as a critic. I had made one rather. serious mistake in one of the poems, --- a fault in taste which I had overlooked. She called my attention to it so explicitly, yet so delicately, that I could have thanked her with tears. "A sweeter woman ne'er drew breath " than she was to me that day.

The last time that I saw Mrs. Stowe was on the occasion of her seventieth birthday; when, at the country seat of Governor and Mrs. Claflin, in Newtonville, her publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Muffin and Company, tendered her a reception, ---I think she called it a birthday party.

It fell to me to go out to the breakfast with Doctor Holmes, who always loved and appreciated Mrs. Stowe, and who seemed to enjoy himself like a happy boy all day. His tribute, written for the day, was one of the best of his famous occasional poems; and he did me the honor to read my own unimportant verses for me---a thing which I found it impossible to do for myself --- with such grace and fervor as almost made me feel as if I had written something of Doctor Holmes's. It was a unique sensation; and, though one of the most humbling of life, yet one of the most agreeable.

Mrs. Stowe's appearance that day---one of her last, I think, in public---was a memorable one. Her dignity, her repose, a certain dreaminess and aloofness of manner characteristic of her, blended gently with her look of peace and unmistakable happiness. Crowded with honors as her life had been, I have fancied that this, among her latest, in her quiet years, and so full of the tenderness of personal friendship, had especial meanings to her, and gave her deep pleasure. Among our literary people no one of consequence omitted to do honor to the foremost woman of America: there were possibly one or two exceptions, of the school which does not call "Uncle Tom's Cabin" literature unless it is obliged to; but they were scarcely missed.

The most beautiful story which I ever heard about Mrs. Stowe I have asked no permission to share with the readers of these papers, and yet I feel sure that no one who loves and honors her could refuse it ; for I believe that if the whole of it were told, it might live to enhance the nobility of her name and fame as long as Uncle Tom himself. It was told me, as such things go, from lip to lip of personal friends who take pride in cherishing the sweetest thoughts and facts about those whom they love and revere.

During the latter part of her life Mrs. Stowe has been one of those devout Christian believers whose consecration takes high forms. She has placed faith in prayer, and given herself to the kind of dedication which exercises and cultivates it. There came a time in her history when one who was very dear to her seemed about to sink away from the faith in which she trusted, and to which life and sorrow had taught her to cling as only those who have suffered, and doubted, and accepted, can.

This prospect was a crushing grief to her, and she set herself resolutely to avert the calamity if, and while, she could. Letter after letter---some of them thirty pages long---found its way from her pen to the foreign town in which German rationalism was doing its worst for the soul she loved. She set the full force of her intellect intelligently to work upon this conflict. She read, she reasoned, she wrote, she argued, she pleaded. Months passed in a struggle whose usefulness seemed a pitiable hope, to be frustrated in the effort.

Then she laid aside her strong pen, and turned to her great faith. As the season of the sacred holiday approached, she shut herself into her room, secluding herself from all but God, and prayed, as only such a believer --- as only such a woman---may. As she had set the full force of her intellect, so now she set the full power of her faith to work upon her soul's desire. One may not dwell in words upon that sacred battle. But the beautiful part of the story, as I have been told it, is, that a few weeks after this a letter reached her, saying only: "At Christmas time a light came to me. I see things differently now. I see my way to accept the faith of my fathers; ---and the belief in Christianity which is everything to you has become reasonable and possible to me at last."

Andover is but twenty miles from Boston, and it was an easy slide from the Hill to town life. For many years my winters were practically spent among Boston friends. Nothing, however, can ever make a real country girl into a cockney; and my tendency towards town has never been a law of gravitation. I cannot remember the time when I was not happy to get back to country horizons; to the ice-storm on the heavily-hanging, glittering elms; to the blue snow that succeeds the rose of a clear, cold sunset; to the etching of the fine twigs against a winter sky at noon; to the white powder on the spruce boughs, and the deep color of the pines; to the noble brow of Wachusett solemnly greeting me from its distant watch; to the peace and the purity of unspotted drifts and snow-fields, and the stillness of long nights broken only by the starting and cracking of ice in the solid crust about the silent house; or even to the roar of the northwest gale, straight from the mountains, unobstructed and almighty, thundering against the quivering windows like the soul of "a strong, wicked man" (as Blake pictured him) set adrift in space: and always to the huge, open fires such as no city hearth ever knows, generously ornamenting the furnace-heated house with the glow and the gladness that belong only to the heart of unstinted flame. I came home early and often (like the busy voter), and the soul of the true suburban who cannot long look upon town as a place to "stay," grew in me. I can remember but once when the deprivations of the country in midwinter gave me a kind of distaste amounting, almost to horror, and like most of our strong or unnatural aversions, that was pathological. I was on crutches; and Andover Hill was in ice. The world wore a mail of frozen fire that lasted for many weeks. The snow-plough had abandoned the battle with the sidewalks, which rolled underfoot with broken icicles writhing upon solid ice.

The dignified elms whose attitudes were not less stately in January than in June, bent like mutilated gods beneath their cruel loads. Their broken boughs and mangled branches lay frozen into the crust all over the Hill --- a pitiable ruin. To this day, some of the finest trees in Andover have not recovered from the devastation of that winter. It was weeks before the mercy of the thaw befell them and us. Sometimes, then, the "shut in," glancing at the world of ice which she dared not watch, thought with a certain Arctic desolation of laughing streets, of the sound of shovel and ice-pick on traversable pavements, of bright interiors, and welcoming eyes, and mettlesome conversation, and the little physical and large mental luxuries of the town, where winter is but a pleasant stagescene in a warm theatre, shifting in its turn among the other diversions of life.

Among the charming homes towards which my good fortune led me in those years, were a few especially known in Boston for their graceful power in attracting distinguished guests. Of the friends who presided over these centres of delightful entertainment, all but one(2) are yet living: it is therefore scarcely permitted me---excepting in his case---to put my affectionate debt in words.

So much has been written of Mr. Fields, and his interesting personality is still so well remembered, that perhaps I have little to add that is new to the appreciation in which he is yet held. He was a man not always understood; sometimes a little envied; but widely beloved. Perhaps no man in our country and in our times has commanded more personal friendships with valuable natures. His position at the head of one of the leading publishing houses of the land brought him, of course, into frequent relation with selected people. This great house, which has always aimed to publish literature, owes much of its position and power to his personality. It seems to me --- I knew him well --- fully as remarkable a personality now, at this distance of time, as I thought it when, as a frightened young author, I first accepted Mrs. Fields's hospitality, and the friendship of both.

As a publisher, his courtesy amounted to beneficence. It used often to be said of him, that Mr. Fields could refuse a manuscript and send a rejected author away happier than any other man could by accepting it. He had one of the kindest hearts I ever knew; and his good-will to men was a fountain, springing up to continual life. From the first day when the letter about "The Gates Ajar" came to Andover, ---that pretty, personal letter, not left to any secretary to write for him, ---telling a hopeless girl that "the book was moving grandly," I received nothing but good measure from a publisher and a friend, whose memory will always stand apart to me as that of one of the valuable influences of my life. I am but one of many who would say as much, and more, than this. After his death, the tributes which poured in would have astonished those who only knew Mr. Fields as a man of the world, a gay converser, a delightful host, a connoisseur in letters, and a distinguished publisher.

"He rendered me a great service." "In the darkest hour of my life, he came, giving light and hope." "He was to me, as to so many others, the helpful friend when I most needed help. Such men are the heralds of the Millennium." "His mind," said Doctor Holmes, "was as hospitable as his roof; which accepted famous writers and quiet friends alike, as if it had been their own." Whittier, who had known Mr. Fields for forty years, wrote to me of him in these words. "He loved much, pitied much, and never hated. He was Christ-like in sympathy and kindness, and in doing good. My turn will soon come. God grant I may meet it with half his cheerfulness and patience."

It was written of him long ago: "Society will pass on 'Mr. Fields's stories' for years to come; but when these are forgotten, silent men and women will cherish their sacred share of Mr. Fields's kindness."

One of his favorite dinner-table stories was of the man who was "a firm friend to every one who did not need a friend." His laughing eye lay in wait to see if one would tumble into his little trap, and its merry respect for one's self-protecting intellect, if one perceived the net, was as refreshing as after-dinner coffee.

One of the prettiest stories I ever heard about Mr. Fields, I think, may have been already told in his memoirs; but I am sure I shall not be forbidden to recall it here.

On one of his lecture tours at the West, in a small town, an inexperienced young person had engaged him without suitable advertisements or arrangements. It was a bitter night, and the audience was so scanty that the poor young man who, presumably, had not a dollar wherewith to meet his liabilities, was overcome with anguish. Mr. Fields, used to the best audiences in America, exhibited no discomfort, but quietly took the young manager apart, released him from all pecuniary obligation to the lecturer, and inquired the extent of his indebtedness for all other expenses. These were quietly met out of the lecturer's own pocket; and that young man went away adoring.

I remember one instance which, undoubtedly, was but one of many like it, never brought to the knowledge of his friends, where Mr. Fields's observant eye discovered a well-known author under one of the lapses of fortune so common in our struggling calling, sick, neglected, and poor past the edge of want. The publisher hunted up the poor fellow, made a call of courtesy, talked a little in his cheerful way, and left. But that afternoon came to the sufferer the proceeds of his visitor's last lecture. "I have just cashed the check," wrote the happy-natured Samaritan, "and am convinced the bills are counterfeit. I have no kind of use for them. Do get them off my hands."

Mr. Fields was a man of marked chivalry of nature, and, at a time when it was not fashionable to help the movements for the elevation of women, his sympathy was distinct, fearless, and faithful. In a few instances we knew and he knew that this fact deprived him of the possession of certain public honors which would otherwise have been offered him.

He advocated the political advancement of our sex, coeducation, and kindred movements, without any of that apologetic murmur so common among the half-hearted or the timid. His fastidious and cultivated literary taste was sensitive to the position of women in letters. He was incapable of that literary snobbishness which undervalues a woman's work because it is a woman's. A certain publishing enterprise which threatened to treat of eminent men came to his notice. He quickly said: "The time has gone by for that! Men and women! Men and women!"

"When the war is over," he said to Mrs. Livermore, when she appealed to him for some help (which he generously gave) in behalf of the Sanitary Commission, "you must give us a book of your experience, and show us the heavenly side of the War."

I remember one day after his mortal illness was upon him, that I chanced to be passing through the hall, as he was preparing to go out. He was too weak to put on his own overcoat, and he was obliged to ask a servant to do it for him. I was struck with the manner in which he did this : "Lisa" --- he said gently, "I am afraid I must trouble you." Any thoughtful gentleman might have said as much; but how many would have given a servant an order in such a tone as his ? It is not possible to reproduce the delicacy and chivalry of it ; as if, because she was a woman, he would have spared her that trifling, personal service.

I thought of this when I heard recently the testimony of a refined young woman who, to aid herself in her education, had taken service in a New York family, determined to try the experiment of "lady help," of which the employer talks so much, and concerning which the employee is often so mysteriously silent: "I left the situation," she said. "The gentlemen of the family came in and handed me their dripping umbrellas on a wet day without a glance or a word ---not as if I were a human being --- just as if I had been an umbrella stand. I could not bear it."

Bryant said of Mr. Fields that no one could impress upon the people of this country so well as he the value and importance of the study of English literature. This I believe to have been no exaggerated view of the usefulness and quality of his lectures and writings. Personal acquaintance with him was an intellectual privilege, of which it is impossible to speak otherwise than gratefully.

My individual debt to Mr. Fields, in respect to my own work, is one which I cannot and would not omit to acknowledge. He often helped me about my titles, and one of the best ever given to any book of mine --- "Men, Women, and Ghosts"---was of his creation. In his fine literary judgment I had great confidence, and would have accepted almost any criticism from him trustfully. But perhaps his quick intuition perceived that I should be too easily disheartened, for I remember almost exclusively the pleasant, the hopeful, the appreciative words with which he stimulated my courage and my work.

I recall an occasion when I had ventured into a entirely new avenue of effort, and was in that chaos succeeding work and preceding publication, which one may call the author's abyss,--- so hopeless was I of the success of my undertaking. How did he know? for I had not said this to any person; but before the article came out, while it was yet in press, swiftly came the little note: "A better paper never appeared in this or any other magazine!" I held up my head and breathed again, until that dreaded and dreadful number of the "Atlantic" had gone by.

I was once introduced by a clever man to a gentleman in these words, ---" Let me present to you one of your natural foes: he is a publisher." Such kindness and thoughtfulness as that of Mr. Fields endeared the publisher to his authors, and made of them his natural friends.

His sense of delicacy in literary, as in all other matters, was of a high and fine quality. I remember once dining at his table with a public singer who, though a woman of irreproachable character and position, had acquired a little something slipshod in her way of talking; of the sort that is common among people of the stage. She used a certain expression, --perfectly simple and suitable to her view, --- but one which we were not accustomed to hear at that table. The face of the host, a moment before shining with geniality and fun, froze instantly. The perfect silence in which that unfortunate word was received, was the only rebuke possible under the circumstances; but if was enough. The guest understood, I think; though she looked as much astonished as embarrassed.

Before "The Story of Avis" went to press, I read the manuscript to Mr. and Mrs. Fields; it was the only time, I believe, that I imposed such a burden on these good friends. When I came to the chapter where Ostrander sits late at the piano with Barbara, while his sick wife sleeps upstairs, Mr. Fields interrupted me with an expression of recoil. "Oh, no!" he cried; "no, no! Not that! Don't introduce anything of that kind! Keep the story above that!" He was appeased when I read on, and he learned that the worst of the situation consisted in the fact that Ostrander did take Barbara's hand. But I think his heart went back grudgingly to the tale which he had feared was about to descend into a moral quagmire; and that it took him some time to recover his trust in it. In the end, I hope he did.

His was a rich life, and his a rare home. There has been no other in America quite like it. Those of us who received its hospitality recall its inspiration among the treasures of our lives. We think of the peaceful library into which the sunset over the Charles looked delicately, while the "best things" of thought were given and taken by the finest and strongest minds of the day in a kind of electric interplay, which makes by contrast a pale affair of the word conversation as we are apt to use it. We recall the quiet guest-chamber, apart from the noise of the street, and lifted far above the river; that room opulent and subtle with the astral shapes of past occupants, --- Longfellow, Whittier, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Stowe, Kingsley, and the rest of their high order, ---and always resounding softly to the fine ear with the departed tread of Hawthorne, who used to pace the floor on sleepless nights. We remember the separation from paltriness, and from superficial adjustments, which that scholarly and gentle atmosphere commanded. We remember the master of their abode of thought and graciousness, as "Dead, he lay among his books ;" and wish that we had it in our power to portray him as he was.

OF our great pentarchy of poets, one ---Lowell --- I never met; and of another --- Emerson --- my personal knowledge, as I have said, was but of the slightest. With the remaining three I had differing degrees of friendship; and to speak of them is still a privilege full of affectionate sadness.

Longfellow I knew less well than the others; but my few memories of him are as mellow and fair as yesterday's October day melting on the great horizon beyond my study windows. I think the first time that I saw him was at Mr. Fields's; my impressions are that he was ill that day, and a little under the reflection of physical suffering; and that I thought at the time that this fact accounted for the peculiar gentleness of his personality. Afterwards, when I saw him in happier conditions, I learned that this was no pathological incident, but that his atmosphere was like that of the mystic lands "where it is always afternoon." He remains in my thought as one of the gentlest men whom I ever knew. There was a certain innate serenity, quite apart from the quality of his manner; a manner which had the repose of something that it seems almost underbred to call the finest breeding, because it went beyond and below and above that. I heard Emerson once say of some one --- I cannot recall of whom --- that he was "expressed to gold-leaf." Mr. Longfellow could not be defined in this phrase, only because he was too genuine to appropriate it. His endowment of personal culture was so generous as to give one in contact with it the keenest delight. He seemed to me a man cultivated almost to the capacity of his nature. It was inconceivable that he could, under any stress, slip into rudeness of view, or do the incomplete thing. He was finished well-nigh to elaboration. Yet, as I say, he stopped this side of gold-leaf. For he had retained his sincerity almost to the point of naïveté; he had preserved the spontaneity which a lesser man under his attrition with the world would have lost.

I was once in a box at the theatre in a company of friends of whom he was one. The play was a simple affair --- Hazel Kirke: there was nothing great, historic, or perhaps in a strict sense artistic about it ; it was the old story of a Scotch marriage, separated lovers, a wronged girl, and a heartbroken father. There was a scene where Hazel followed her blind father about the room upon her knees, pressing the hem of his long coat to her lips; he meanwhile being ignorant of her presence, and remaining so till she had disappeared. I turned, indiscreetly enough, and looked at the poet where he sat, a little in the shadow of our box. I was astonished to see the tears---not gathering, but falling down his face. He made no effort to conceal or to check them: indeed, I think he was unconscious of them. He noticed none of us; but gave his heart up to the great human passion of the little play with a simplicity and genuineness touching to see.

I remember, at another time, lunching at his house on an occasion when the guest of honor was a great actress of the higher caste. She was not an American; and, thinking to interest her, at our request, Mr. Longfellow read aloud a poem of his, which treated of her own country, and of its struggles for a freedom at that time unattained. When he had finished the reading, he turned, and found her in tears. I know it occurred to me at the time that an actress of her resources might have spared him that; but probably she, too, was genuine when she could be. At all events, the lady wept. I shall never forget the tone and manner with which he turned towards her. "Oh!" he cried, "I meant to give you happiness! ---And I have given you pain !" His accent on the word "pain" was like the smart of a wound. Out of strength came sweetness, and his unspoiled genius had preserved the simple reality of a kind heart.

The finest tribute which I ever heard offered to Longfellow was one which may not have found its way into print; for it did not come from the great of the earth, claiming their own and revering him. He had his due of that, in life and in death. It would have been an honor to statesmen or to kings to be guests at the poet's table. But what sweeter thing was ever said of him than this ? "If there is any person in Cambridge, or in Boston, whom he knows to be in greater need than any other, of social kindness; any one obscure, overlooked, unknown, and friendless, --- that is the person you are sure to find invited to Mr. Longfellow's house."

Mr. Longfellow was very kind to me, in certain opinions which he expressed about some of my writings not agreeable to all my readers. At the time "The Story of Avis" came out, I received from him a few letters which were the greatest possible comfort to me; for, though I had not expected that book to have a wide circle of friends, yet I did hope in some measure to atone by their quality for their quantity.

Even in autobiography I could not bring myself to reprint those letters so far as they dealt with my book; but the fact that he understood my favorite heroine where smaller men might not, or did not, has been one of the pleasantest bits of subconsciousness in the life of a writer who has had her share of misapprehension and critical, abuse. I have, in fact, never met any other man who showed, from the author's point of view, such a marvelous intuition in the comprehension of an unusual woman ; or of what the author of "Avis" tried to do, in relating her history. "The Story of Avis" was a woman's book, hoping for small hospitality at the hands of men.

Mr. Longfellow came but once to my home on Gloucester Harbor; but on that occasion I had the especial pleasure of pointing out to him the reef of "Norman's Woe;" which, though he had wrecked the schooner Hesperus, and broken half our hearts upon it, he had singularly enough never seen (I think he said) before.

I remember one dull, cold day---it was a Sunday --- when, being entertained at the home of Governor and Mrs. Claflin, I found Mr. Whittier also a guest. The suggestion arose that we should drive out to see Mr. Longfellow. This we did; ---Mr. Whittier, Mrs. ----- and myself. Mr. Whittier was at his brightest on that drive to Cambridge; full of good stories, and good appreciation of them; more than usually cheerful, and inclined to talk happily. We drove up to Longfellow's door; there seemed an unusual silence about the calm and gentle place. Mr. Whittier went on alone and rang the bell. It was our purpose to remain in the carriage, I think, leaving the two poets to themselves undisturbed by our smaller personalities. We were, therefore, astonished to see Mr. Whittier returning in a moment. He ran down the steps and sprang in with excitement, hitting his tall hat, I remember, on the carriage door, and entirely unconscious that he had done so. He was more agitated than I had ever seen him.

"Longfellow is sick!" he cried, "very sick! They are very anxious." He leaned back on the carriage cushions, much perturbed. It is a long time since I have seen him!" he said drearily. His agitation remained. The drive back to Boston was a gloomy one. His vivacity was quite extinguished. He scarcely spoke to either of us all the way; but stared solemnly out of the window with eyes that seemed to see nothing nearer than the world to which his great friend was called. Every one who knew him can understand what his wonderful eyes must have been to look upon at such a time. We rode home, and he went at once to his room; where his hostess always decreed that he should be sheltered from all possible intrusion. Longfellow died, if I am correct about it, two days after. To this day, I seem to see him passing on, through the seer's look in Whittier's eyes.

"It was a disappointment," he wrote, "not to be able to see Longfellow then, and much more after his death; but I am glad I went on that last Sabbath, and that thee was with me . . . . Ah, well! as Wordsworth asked, after commemorating the friends who had left him : 'Who next shall fall and disappear?' I await the answer with awe and solemnity, and yet with unshaken trust in the mercy of the All Merciful."

Whittier was a shy and scanty visitor; and a new interior was an insurmountable trouble to him in his later years. I think he cultivated in himself a kind of chronic expectation of sometime fulfilling his conditional promise to come and see me; but in point of fact he never did. I saw him at the houses of one or two old friends in town, where he had acquired a habit of flitting in and out; or else at his own home. And he wrote, when he. could. Sometimes long silence fell between the letters. Sometimes they succeeded each other quickly. This was as it happened. To me, my broken acquaintance with him was one of the inspirations of my life.

He was full of frolic, in a gentle way; no one of the world's people ever had a keener sense of humor. From every interview with him one carried away a good story, or a sense of having had a good time: he never darkened the day, or shadowed the heart. He inspirited. He invigorated. "I like," he wrote to a friend, "the wise, Chinese proverb: 'You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you may prevent them from stopping to build their nests in your hair!'"

With what boyish delight he absorbed a fresh anecdote, if it had the right ring to it, and how tenderly he encouraged the best of the old ones! Most of the more amusing incidents of his personal experience have been long ago published by the friends with whom he used to share them. Perhaps the story about Lucy Larcom is one of them: but I venture to repeat it, as one which has vividly stayed by me.

A caller, one of "the innumerable throng that moves" to the doors of the distinguished, there to indulge the weak curiosity of an ignorance too pitiable to be angry with, made himself troublesome one day in the poet's home at Amesbury.

"I have come, Sir," he said pompously, to take you by the hand. I have long wished to know the author of 'Hannah binding Shoes!

Now Lucy Larcom happened to be sitting, in her serene fashion, silently by the window at that time; and Mr. Whittier turned towards her with the courtly bow into which the Quaker poet's simple manner could bend so regally, when he chose.

"I am happy," replied Mr. Whittier, waving his hand towards the lady in the window, "to have the opportunity to present thee to the author of that admirable poem --- Lucy Larcom!"

It was one of Mr. Whittier's laughable reminiscences of anti-slavery days, when he was a free soil candidate for Congress, that he was charged by political enemies with "ill-treating his wife" !

For so gentle a man Mr. Whittier was a very keen lance in argument. A man who prided himself on being a disbeliever in Christianity once obtruded his views on Mr. Whittier in a blatant manner; enforcing the assertion that there was no truth in the doctrine of immortality, because he knew that he had, himself, no soul. "Friend," replied the poet, with rippling eyes, " I quite agree with thee. I am ready to admit that thee has no soul. But speak for thyself, friend, speak for thyself!"

As I knew Mr. Whittier in his later years, my impressions of his life are those of its most lonely period. With heartache for which there are no words, I used to come away sometimes, from glimpses of its deep, inward desolation. Friends in full measure he had; and everything possible was done in his descending years, by those who had the nearest right to minister to him, to give him comfort. But his solitude went too deep for the surface relations of life to fathom. Illness, and deafness, and the imperfect use of his eyes increased it heavily. He could read but very little, and could write less.

His home at Danvers was a pleasant one, full of creature comforts, and womanly kindliness; but the New England winter pressed heavily about it.

"How do you spend the days?" I asked once, upon a bitter afternoon, when I had gone over from Andover to see him for an hour. He glanced over my head into the snow-storm. His face was not dreary; but wore one of its gravest looks.

"Oh," he said patiently, "I play with the dogs; or I go out and see the horses. And then I talk to Phoebe. ---And I go into my study, and sit awhile."

"There is always some one to talk to," he said, in his gentle, grateful way; he spoke as if this fact were an unusual privilege.

One must have spent more than one invalid winter in a New England village, to understand in the least what such isolation was to a man of his gifts and social instincts, and in the deepening solitude of old age. Yet nothing could stir the roots which he had grown into the soil of his native pines.

To a friend who placed an empty cottage in Florida at his disposal, one winter, he replied: "I thank thee for thy kind offer of the Florida cottage; but I must live if I can, and die if I must, in Yankee land."

Whittier suffered from physical disabilities, ---only those who knew him well ever suspected how much, or how seriously these affected the exercise of his great powers. He was but a wretched sleeper; usually, his biographer tells us, awake before the dawn; and accustomed to sleep with his curtain raised, that he might watch the movement of the sunrise. It will be remembered how touchingly his old habit wrought upon him, on the day when he fell into his last sleep; when the nurse would have drawn the shade to darken the room, and he feebly waved his hand to order it raised again, that he might not lose the final sunrise of his life.

His love of nature was always something exquisite, and as fresh as a lad's to his last hour. I find his letters to me full of such touches as these : ---

"These November days of Indian summer make me happy that I have lived to see them."

"I am glad to be permitted once more to see the miracle of spring."

Again, I find the page sprinkled with magnolia buds, hepaticas, and violets, and "when the golden dandelion comes, it will be really spring. I would rather see these flowers in the world beyond than the golden streets we are told of."

But I am borrowing even these few extracts from a previous publication of his letters, which I have no right to reproduce in any fullness here.

I have often heard him say that he called five hours' sleep a fine night's rest ; and that for weeks at a time he would be unable to write more than a few stanzas or a few lines. He worked under severer physical limitations than any other of the great writers of our country; yet how wholesome, how genial, how brave his work!

"He gave the people of his best. His worst he kept; his best he gave." Like other solitary lives of the higher caste, his chief happiness was in his friendships. Of these he had many among the elect spirits; and he sustained them with remarkable fidelity. I sometimes used to think that he found it almost too hard to criticise any of his friends, or to give us friendly blame: but if so, he atoned for that by the stimulating, northwesterly courage which he was sure to have in store for us; always giving us faith in ourselves and in our own work.

And, indeed, he could smite like an angel when he would. Of this we need no other witness than his famous poem on Daniel Webster, --- " Ichabod." Though it is but just to say that I heard him during the last years of his life lament, if he did not quite repent, that poem. "I am afraid I was too severe," he would say: --- "Does thee think I was?"

In memorable contrast to that of our great hermit ran the life of the Beacon Street poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yet the two were friends in the genuine sense of the word. Whittier's seclusion held many of his friendships off by a sceptre as delicate, but as definite, as the frosted fronds of one of his own pine-boughs. But in the case of Doctor Holmes, I know that the mutual attraction was affectionate and real. "We are more than literary friends," Whittier once said to me of the Autocrat. "We love each other."

I remember one winter day lunching with Whittier at Doctor Holmes's table, no other guests being present; and I think---for me---it was the dumbest lunch at which I ever sat. I found it impossible to talk, for my speech seemed a piece of intrusion on the society of larger planets, or a higher race than ours. To listen to those two was one of the privileges of a life-time. They interchanged their souls--- now like boys, and now like poets; merrily or gravely; Whittier shining at his happiest, and Holmes scintillating steadily. As for that, he always did. Doctor Holmes was decidedly the most brilliant converser whom I have ever met.

It was my good fortune to receive him as a guest sometimes at Gloucester, in my summer home. For several years he acquired the kind habit of coming over from Beverly Farms to spend a day, or a few hours, on our ruder shore. I remember that on his first call I felt moved as one does with a new guest, to show off our attractions at Eastern Point, and that I took him, thoughtlessly enough, down into the big trap gully in front of my châlet, where the purple lava and the bronze kelp and the green sea-weed brightened and faded beneath the rising and ebbing waves, whose "high-tide line" came almost to my doorstep.

It was very rough walking; and when I saw that it was not easy for him, --- for he was even then an old man, --- I cannot say what I might not have done by way of atoning for my mistake. I do not think I had extended my hand; I had only extended my thought; which he read by that marvelous perception of his, needing to wait for neither word nor motion.

"No, no!" he cried decidedly, "No, no, no! Don't you offer to help me! Don't you dare offer to help me! I couldn't stand that."

I had nothing for it but to let him clamber about over the jagged boulders as he would, without protest or assistance; and I thanked the heavenly fates which brought him without accident back to the piazza. Here he found the breeze which blows eternally on Gloucester harbor too cool for him, and we retreated indoors, where it seemed to be tacitly understood that we should agree to dispense with any further explorations; as from that time we did. By the open door and windows we sat and talked until his train left, or his carriage came. It might have been two hours or six; or we might have talked on for sixty, for aught I know, if this had been a world without enforced interruptions--- I wonder if there are none such?

As I look back upon those, to me, absorbing discussions, they seem to have been either theological or religious: there is a difference; and he gave himself freely to both. They had little beginning and no end, and each year he came back as fresh as ever to the pleasant fray.

His old grievance against Andover, where, as a lad in Phillips Academy, he was unjustly punished, lay bitterly in his heart to the end of his life; I think he had mingled this wrong a little in his imagination---not in his intellect---with what he conceived to be the errors of the evangelical view of religion ; and that I represented to him, at first, a liberalized and modernized Andover, with which he could "have it out." After a little, he passed all that, and our talk deepened with our acquaintance. It grew franker and graver, and gentler.

When I first knew him, his repugnance to Orthodox Christianity, or to such aspects of it as an unfortunate personal experience had extended to him, was something more than bitter. He talked like a man who believed himself to be redressing a great moral wrong, and who felt obliged to emphasize his crusade whenever he could. In the latter years of his life I saw a great change in him in this respect. He talked less of theology, and more of Christianity; less of error, and more of truth; less of other men's failures to represent the divine life and purpose as it should be, and more of the great longings and struggle of the human heart, or of his own, to reach the "Everlasting Love," around whose throne are clouds and darkness.

More than once I have heard him speak of Canon Farrar's book, "Eternal Hope," with an emotion touching to witness, and ennobling to remember. His face broke, and the tears stirred at the mere mention of the title. "I cannot get beyond it," he said reverently. "'Eternal Hope!' I cannot talk about the title of that book. It moves me too much. It goes too deep."

We spoke more, as the evening of his life came on, of the more spiritual approaches to religious truth, and less of its controversial, which, I hope, dwindled in importance to him, as he came nearer to the great solution of doubts and beliefs which awaits us all. Yet he always preserved a strong demarcation of reticence about his own inner spiritual life. This, old age did not weaken in the least. He withheld as obviously as he gave.

I remember that he was approached during the very last year, or years, by a friend acting in behalf of "McClure's Magazine," who had been asked to induce him, if possible, to consent to an interview with Professor Drummond and myself, upon the subject of Immortality; portions of this discussion, so far as he might select and personally revise them, were to be published. He declined, without a moment's hesitation, saying with his quick wit: "I will neither be lured nor mac-lured into anything of the kind !"

But in a personal letter he spoke more gravely on the matter: "Nothing would delight me more than to talk over Time and Eternity with you and Mr. Ward, but as to saying anything on these subjects to be reported, I would as soon send a piece of my spinal marrow to one of these omnivorous editors . . . . Perhaps I may not think it worth while to express myself with absolute freedom on the deepest question."

Doctor Holmes's appreciation of human suffering seemed to me as exquisite as almost any that I ever approached. It did not stop with his heart, but permeated his whole intellect. For so merry a man, one so brimming with fun, his sense of the universal misery was extraordinary.

"Outside, I laugh," he said to me once. "Inside, I never laugh. It is impossible. The world is too sad."

"Oh, the poor women!" he said again, turning to me a face broken with compassion. "It is as much as one can bear, to think of the sufferings of women ---what they endure --- what they always have --- in this world

"How can God bear it ?" he cried, at another time, suddenly starting from silence which had fallen upon our discussion ; --- " this ball of anguish forever spinning around before Him, and the great hum of its misery going up to His ears!

Yet who was so quick and warm of heart as he, to give happiness or to share it?

Out of courtesy to his biographer, I do not feel at liberty here to publish his letters ; but I am tempted to select portions of one, which I am sure neither law nor gospel would forbid me to claim as my very own; and that is the letter received from him a few days after my marriage. It was one of the first --- as it was one of the kindest --- to reach us. I cannot give it entire, but extract :

"You have made me cry a great many times. Now you make me smile with gratification to know that you are anchored in that happy haven where the highest blessings of life are to be found by those who are fitted for its manifold experiences.

"I hope the gates of yours will never be ajar, but always wide open to all old friendships and all good influences, and always closed against every ill from which your earthly lot can be protected.

"My wishes for you are very many, my prayers are very brief, but they overflow with the sincerest desire for your happiness in this world for which you have done so much, and in that other into which you have looked with clearer eyes than ours."

The last time that he came to see us was in Gloucester, a year and a half, I think, before he died. Our little house had been moved since his last visit, and I tried to show him certain of the best changes in the landscape. He tried, politely, but it was pitifully evident that he could not see beyond the bright marsh colors in the autumn light just outside our gate. The horizon of the sea, I am sure, was quite beyond his fading eyes.

We begged him to try to get out from town and see our winter home in Newton, where we cherish some remarkable scenery: but he shook his head, pathetically, without speaking. After a moment's silence, he touched his eyes. "I could not see it," he said. "There is no more new scenery for me till I see the outlines of the Eternal City."

I saw him after this but twice, once at the table of our best of friends and publishers, Mr. Houghton --- I wonder, have they seen each other by this time, in the New Country ? ---where I thought him more than usually quiet; either ill or sad; but doing his best to give the bright wine of thought that was always expected of Doctor Holmes in society. And, by the way, how truly he loved it!

"I have," he said to me once, "what I call my dinner-table intimacies. I enjoy them very much."

My last look at him was in his own study, overlooking the silver-gray color of Charles River, on a winter afternoon. We talked ---much in the old way --- but more soberly, and ever more gently. His soul seemed to be brimming over with kindness to every form of life in this world, and in the world beyond.

Even the Andover schoolmaster was forgiven and forgotten. Of Andover theology he had now nothing to say. His heart seemed to be melting with tenderness, with desire to give happiness and to spare pain; and he like one who waited, without regret or disturbance, the summons to that

"Love Divine that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear."

He insisted on coming downstairs with me when I left; he took my hand silently; upon his face was the look which only the aged wear, when they part from younger friends; as if he dared not say, " It is the last time--- but knew it, though I did not.

FOR many years one of the brightest figures in literary Boston, was Celia Thaxter.

She had, if not more leisure, perhaps more temperament and, at all events, more strength for social life than some others of the group; and she was always sure of a welcome which, in itself, was a great temptation to earn it. She was the best of good company. Everybody wanted her. Hearty, happy, wholesome, she rose through a decorous drawing-room or sedate library, like a breeze from her own island waves. When she had gone, one felt as if an East wind had suddenly died down.

She was the most fearless, the most independent of beings. It mattered little to her what other people did or thought; at least, on secondary subjects. She was never afraid to be herself. To certain modulations of manner she never consented. "Celia Thaxter's laugh" is well remembered. No subdued and conventional mirth softly rippled from her broad chest and honest larynx. When she laughed, she pealed. This merry ring was infectious. It was as impossible to hear it, and not laugh too, as it is for the feet that love dance music to keep still before it. She was the incarnation of good spirits.

Her vigorous physique had much to do with this, for she had her share of the sorrows of life. These she bore characteristically, without much complaint, with some suppressed cynicism, and with that bubbling faith in brighter futures so easy to the sanguine nature.

I knew her as one does a comrade with whom one is never intimate; but whom one regards affectionately, and whose history one makes guesses at, or forms opinions of, from a definite distance. I do not offer of her, in any sense, the reminiscences of a confidential friend.

Once, I remember, I vexed her by something in a letter which I wrote her apropos of a religious discussion that we had held, in an interrupted form. She was then at the bitterest turn in the long avenue that leads through defiance to acceptance of religious truth. But she forgave me, I think, --- I am sure I did her, --- and I am very sure that in the later years of her life she would have given the plea of any Christian a different reception. I did not know her intimately enough to say just how far the growth of her religious character carried her, in intellectual form, and I have no right to mark its boundaries. But I think the longing for it was always in her.

"If I believed as you do," she said to me once, fiercely, "nothing would daunt me! Nothing would daunt me!"

I was present one day when she was describing to a little group a wreck off Appledore: how she sat at her window, watching one of the cruelest gales of the midwinter Atlantic gather its forces. The breakers upon her own rocks were at their worst. A solitary sail blurred on the racing horizon, and beat up; the vessel struck on the reef, and broke to pieces. The Islands were helpless to help. It was impossible to extend an oar. Watchers on that little spot of life could only sit and see the game of death go on: it was not a snarl and a snap, but a slow torture. For the crew had hung and clung to the teeth of a rock around which the whirlpool played; and there their distant figures, drenched and drowning, pleaded for their lives in the sight of the warm-hearted woman who could only watch them slip and drop off, one by one.

I think she said they clung there for five hours before they surrendered to the sea.

When Mrs. Thaxter had told the story in her own inimitable manner, with the vividness of vitriol she lifted her eyes, flung them straight at mine, with the dreariest look that I ever saw on the face of any doubter in the darkest den of despair.

"Fools to cling!" she cried. "They were fools---fools to cling!"

I have never been one of those fortunate people who have their happy thoughts at tongue's end ; my repartees are apt to wait for my pen; else I should have answered her: ---

"Philosophers to cling! While there is hope of life eternal, the saddest mortal life is worth the living. Philosophers to cling!"

It is a pleasant thought to me that this gifted woman, with the luxurious heart and the eager brain, was herself philosopher enough to cling, until a distinct measure of spiritual light and peace came to her later on.

She was full of a certain wit, or perhaps more exactly, humor, which was native to herself, and strong of the salt of her own seaweeds.

One day, I remember, she sat painting china --- which she did after a graceful and original fashion ---when some one present ventured a commonplace about the delights of her island life: its solitude, its peacefulness, its opportunities to study nature, and so on. It was in winter, and it was snowing. She looked out of the window into the clashing Boston street, then threw back her head, and laughed out long and joyously.

"Did you ever try it?" she said; "I've had enough of the wilderness. Give me a horsecar!"

Mrs. Thaxter was of attractive personal appearance, retaining some suggestion of the beauty for which she was distinguished in her first youth; when, betrothed as a mere child, and a bride at sixteen, the Miranda of the Shoals wedded the first man whom she had known, and ventured upon the mainland of life at the age when, if she had been a girl of our day under the usual conditions, she would have been preparing to "come out," or fitting for college.

Like a pale purple aster beside a gorgeous golden-rod, the sweet wraith of Lucy Larcom flits in beside that of Mrs. Thaxter in my memory.

It falls away again quickly, for I saw Miss Larcom but seldom: I knew her chiefly through her letters, which reached me at irregular intervals. I had the sincerest respect both for her personality and for her work. One of the ex-editors of the "Atlantic Monthly," himself a brilliant writer, once reviewed a book of hers in these words: --

She was not a woman to mind being "called names" in this fashion; but undoubtedly had her laugh out, with the editor, at this clever turn of words.

The value of her work is beyond question: the strength of it continually surprises one who is, from the surface, chiefly impressed with her gentleness of spirit.

She was always more or less in the thick of a struggle for existence; life was never easy to her, but she gave ease to it. There was a kind of comfortableness about her, which, I think, impressed me more than anything else in her personality. Miss Larcom had a fine presence. She was large and well-proportioned, and had a certain sort of handsomeness. The well-known picture of her in the bonnet is the best that I have ever seen.

She had absolute simplicity of manner; I never saw in her a trace of either embarrassment or elaboration, much less of affectation. She was a motherly-looking woman. À stranger might have guessed her to be in the process of putting several boys through college; not in the least worried about their debts, and never nagging them about their scrapes.

This ease of nature sometimes led to a little dreaminess, or absence of practical attention, of which her friends were laughingly and lovingly aware. There is a story told of a ride that she took with Mr. Whittier --- I cannot now recall it in his precise words.

The hill was steep, Mr. Whittier was driving. The horse was gay. The load --- on the lady's side, at least---was not light. Lucy Larcom was talking, and she talked on. I think the subject was the life to come. At all events, it was some abstract theme, grave and high.

The horse grew unruly. The buggy lurched and rolled. Whittier grasped the reins valiantly, anticipating a possible accident, and centring his being on the emergency. But Lucy talked on serenely.

The horse threatened to break. The danger redoubled. The buggy sagged heavily, on Lucy's side. Still, peacefully she murmured on.

"Lucy!" exploded the poet, at last. "Lucy! If thee does not stop talking till I get this horse in hand, thee will be in heaven before thee wants to!"

There was in those days in Boston a dear old lady living "all alone in a shoe," one might say, so narrow was her home; she was seldom seen in society, but was valuable to it, accordingly. I saw her only twice, but she impressed me as a strong and lofty personality, so far above the usual social human being that her solitude and the sparseness of her environment seemed to partake of the character of luxuries which most of us were unfit to share.

This was Lydia Maria Child. Some thoughtful hostess --- I think it was Mrs. Fields --- took me one day to call on Mrs. Child. At that time this distinguished abolitionist was occupying lodgings so plain, in a quarter of Boston so much less than fashionable, that I felt a certain awe upon me, as if I were visiting a martyr in prison. There was no exaggeration in this feeling, when one remembered that this woman's life had been one long suppression of self, and obliteration of that background of personal comfort which the rest of us consider essential to our own portraits. It is well known that Mrs. Child sacrificed the prospect of a brilliant literary future to her convictions in the movement for freeing the American slaves.

It is not so well known that she had all her life expended such means as she had in private charities, denying herself every luxury and many common comforts, in order to compass the power to relieve or to prevent suffering.

We climbed the steep stairs of her boardinghouse thoughtfully. Each one of them meant some generous check which Mrs. Child had drawn for the benefit of something or somebody, choosing this restricted life as the price of her beneficence.

She received us in a little sitting-room which seemed to me dreariness personified. Everything was neat, respectable, and orderly; but the paucity of that interior contrasted sadly with the rich nature of its occupant.

I particularly remember the tint of the carpet --- a lifeless brown. The room was so devoid of color as to seem like a cell; and the winter day had been a dark one.

As we sat talking, the sun battled through the clouds, and then we saw that Mrs. Child had "the afternoon side" of her boardinghouse, and knew how to make the most of it. She rose quickly and, taking a little prism which she evidently treasured, hung it in the window so that it caught the southwestern ray.

Instantly the colorless room leaped with rainbows. The sweet old lady stood smiling, in the midst of them ; she directed them this way and that, and threw them all over the empty spaces and plain furniture. She had, I thought, a little in her mind, the consciousness of my companion's own beautiful library and richly endowed life. It was as if she said, --"You see I have not much to offer; but I give you of my best."

This dedicated woman had no luxuries, neither upholstery nor bric-à-brac, as accessories to her peaceful welcome ; --- only God's sunshine, and the rainbows that she knew how to make out of it.

I never see a prism without thinking of her noble life; and I keep one in my study windows to this day, partly in memory of this beautiful and pathetic incident: It did me good, and I do not want to forget it..

Mrs. Child, at our request, talked about her anti-slavery experiences. These moved me very much. But I find that the thing which impressed me most, and has stayed with me longest, was this.

"How did you know?" one of us asked, in the midst of so much doubt and danger, and possible fraud --- how did you always know just whom and where to trust, when these fugitives appealed to you for help?"

"Oh!" she said, "there was a pass-word. It carried any escaping slave through the underground railway, to safety. Sometimes it was written on a slip of torn, soiled paper. Sometimes it was only whispered for dear life's sake. But any colored person who came to us with that pass-word was received and passed on without a question. It carried him anywhere, and gave him every chance that we could command."

She paused, and looked at the rainbows in the lodging-house window dreamily. Her heart had gone far back.

"What was the pass-word?" we ventured to urge.

"I was a stranger and ye took Me in," softly said the old abolitionist.

There was one man in Boston of whom nobody ever saw enough; and I almost too little to offer what I have kept of his great memory.

My acquaintance with Phillips Brooks was rather one of friendliness than of friendship; which is a large word, and one demanding conscientious interpretation, especially in the case of a man in manner so genial to hundreds, and at heart so reserved from all but a few. Yet the more vivid recollections of him which come to my pen seem, at least to me, to have almost too much value to be lost; and I venture to insert one or two of them here.

I met Dr. Brooks only now and then; and his letters were brief, and usually concerned some deed or impulse of mercy or of professional service. My recollections of him, such as they are, I find to be either definitely of a grave and religious nature, or sparkling with social gayety --- one of the two extremes. I do not recall him at all in what I once heard called "a comfortable, middling view of things."

In conversation he was one of the merriest of entertainers. Sometimes I used to think him almost too ready to let the occasion float away in jest, while I, like so many others, would have chosen to sound with him some theme of height or depth; but of course one can readily understand how weary his nerve might have become of the seriousness of life, and how much it needed "the light touch."

For this reason, perhaps, the occasions in which the man revealed himself with power and solemnity are more distinct in my mind.

Once, I had asked a favor of him: that he would receive a little friend of mine, a sweet lassie, who had listened to his preaching till her heart had chosen him for her priest. She was scarcely more than a child, but not at all a common one; her need was genuine, and not to be confounded with a girl's mere heroworship for a popular preacher. In his own hearty way he welcomed her to his house, whither it was expected that I would accompany her. I did so; occupying myself, I remember, with a pile of fresh galleys in another room, while the child went into the preacher's study.

"We will stay," I said, "but ten minutes. Send her out to me when the time is up."

Fifteen minutes passed --- a half hour --- my proof-sheets were all corrected before the clergyman came out with the child. He had given her the heart of the morning, his working-time. Who knows what the little maiden's spirit needed and received of the great preacher's? For the child died before another winter fell. Did that strong, priestly heart prepare her for the new life ---neither knowing why she had sought, or he had given, the strength to take the last, short steps

I turned to speak to them, as the pastor and parishioner came out of the study; but one glance stopped the words upon my lips. The tears were falling down his face, unchecked, unnoticed. He could not speak, and did not try; but solemnly handed the little maiden to my charge, and I left without a word.

Afterwards, when her little, lovely life came to its sharp end, I wrote to tell him. His reply indicated that the interview had made as deep an impression upon him as the witness of it had left upon me.

The last time that I saw Mr. Brooks to speak with him, was at a memorable crisis in his history. It was close upon the date of his acceptance of the Bishopric of Massachusetts; but this fact was not yet generally known. The movement of his own mind at the time, while his decision to leave Trinity Church forever was still seething, was as solemn as prayer.

If one had any doubt of this, the sight of the man, on the occasion to which I refer, would have made it clear to the dullest perception.

We were at lunch, ---four of us, --- Mr. Brooks, Doctor Holmes, Mr. Ward and myself, with friends whose hospitality is expert in the art of selecting the difficult and delightful number of guests which is more than the graces, but less than the muses.

Mr. Brooks was very quiet at first --- almost silent; and it seemed to my slight, social experience with him, unprecedentedly sober. But Doctor Holmes's conversational genius soon struck the sparks from the smouldering fire in the preacher's heart, and the two men began to talk. The rest of us held the breath to listen, as our hostess, with her distinguished tact, stirred the flame when she would; and one of the most remarkable conversations which I ever heard, followed.

On Mr. Brooks's part, this was more than grave, ---it was devout almost to the point of exhortation or prophecy. Doctor Holmes played with the great stream of religious feeling for a few moments, but he quickly and reverently swung himself along with it: I shall never forget the expression with which he regarded Mr. Brooks. It was one of unalloyed trust and admiration; at moments it had a beautiful wistfulness, as if he might have said:

"Of course, you know I can't altogether agree with you; but you almost make me wish I could!"

As the talk deepened, Mr. Brooks roused and raised himself and us to one of those rare altitudes of which one always says afterwards, "It was good to be there."

He began to talk about the duties of the upper to the lower classes of society, and of the Christian to the irreligious. He spoke rapidly, then earnestly, then eagerly, hotly, without fear and without reproach, like the Christian Bayard that he was. At the last, he pushed on into monologue ---a thing I never heard him do before; and no one, not even the king of Boston conversers, cared to interrupt him.

The preacher's eyes burned over our heads into the peaceful perspective of Charles River; his voice took on the priestly ring; he seemed to hear the orders of authority "we could not hear," and to see visions which "we might not see." He scathed the fashionable classes for their follies, and flung a kind of holy scorn at the paltriness and cowardice which excused itself from contact with the suffering and the loathsomeness of the lower world.

To my surprise, he spoke of the Salvation Army in language of deep respect. He honored its work. He prophesied heartily for its future. He spoke contemptuously of the nervousness of people of ease about infection in clothing brought from the sweat-shops, and from homes whose horrors few of us troubled a heart-throb to alleviate. With sacred indignation he rebuked the heathen of the West End, who cared neither for their own souls nor for those of other men. He scored worldliness of heart and life in a lofty denunciation, to which it was impossible to offer a protesting word.

He mentioned, by name, a certain fashionable men's club on the Back Bay.

"The Salvation Army," he cried, "ought to be sent there. Nobody needs them more. They ought to go right through such a place as that, and preach New Testament religion !"

At this point, Doctor Holmes suggested, in a subdued voice:

"But, Doctor Brooks, such men as those are not going to listen to the Salvation Army. It seems to me that you are the man to go into the ----- Club, and preach Christianity."

Mr. Brooks made no reply. The rest of us took the thought up, and urged him a little. But he fell into a silence, so sad that it was impossible to break it. His gaze wandered from us, solemnly. Was he renewing the conflict of soul which must have preceded his determination to leave the pastorate of his loved and loving people? Was he heartsick with his own great ideal of what a Christian teacher might achieve and must forever fail to? Was he thinking of his limits in the light of his aspirations ? He talked no more. In a few moments he abruptly and silently left us.

I was once talking with a man of well-known gifts and power who is a pronounced unbeliever in Christianity, ----- indeed, a free-thinker of a confirmed type. In answer to some personal plea of mine for the rationality of faith, he exclaimed : ----

"A Christian? I? If I were to be a Christian, I should have to be --- why, I should have to be such a man as Phillips Brooks !"

That instinctive reverence in the man of this world for the man of the other I have always called the finest tribute to Mr. Brooks that I have ever heard.

One of the pleasantest recollections which I have of Phillips Brooks is not at all connected with Boston, but brings me to my life at Gloucester, and will be given later in this fragmentary story, which is now well overdue at my own summer home upon the rough shores of Cape Ann.

It fell to me, rather early in life, to try one of those experiments at home-making for one's self in which unmarried women venture less often, I think, than would be good for them and for society at large. My father's absence from Andover in search of his lost health having become a settled part of the summer programmes, I pursued, for a while, the usual career of summer boarder. The usual restlessness for "higher things" resulted.

I had engaged rooms, one summer, upon the other side of Cape Ann, privately known to its North Shore residents as the Pacific Ocean, meaning thereby the region of Ipswich Bay. Our quarters were far from the sea, in the thick of a village, and opposite a grammar school. I bore it for a week, and then, one desperate day, I started upon an exploring expedition. We drove on for seven miles, crossing the noisiest and dustiest and fishiest of little cities, without enthusiasm. Gloucester, as to her business sections, did not prove alluring, but we pushed on eastward down her harbor shore.

Suddenly, at the end of our journey, hot, dusty and discouraged, toiling up what is known as Patch's Hill, we brought our tired pony to a halt, and drew the breath of unexpected and undreamed-of delight. We had discovered Eastern Point.

Out of the salt dust, out of the narrow, scorching streets, by the fish-flakes and the fish-teams, past the rude roads whose boulders seemed to have been only "spatted" down by the whimsical street-commissioner, Time, we came upon the fairest face of all the New England coast, ---the Eastern side of Gloucester Harbor.

The traveling American, who has seen the world, often tells me that here is one of the most beautiful scenes upon the whole round face of it. On this point I am not authorized by experience to testify; but my private convictions are that it would not be easy to find a lovelier bit of coast survey.

There is a nook known as Wonson's; it was then a sheltered, peaceful spot, scarcely devastated by the tramp of the summer boarder, and so undisturbed that I only knew when callers came because the chickens ran past the window to get away from them.

A cottage with its feet in the water and its eyes on the harbor received me; and there, close upon the gorge with the lava trap, and glancing over the little beach where the northwest gales clear out the cool dashes of green and purple and bronze, and where mast and mainsail cut brown and sharp against the gold beyond Ten Pound Island, and the towers of old Gloucester (called by architects picturesque for America) rise against the sunset, I spent the preliminary summers which made me slave to Gloucester shore for life. The result was the châlet known to my "kind readers" as The Old Maids' Paradise.

This I built, and there I lived from May to November, or nearly that. The waves played almost to my door; in winter the spray dashed upon the piazza. The fishermen, my neighbors, drew up their dories upon the rocks in front of me; the foreground was marked by lobsterpots, and nets spread upon the scanty grass to dry or to mend. The fishermen's children --who could hold an oar at the age of three, and whom I have seen placed by their fathers sitting straight in the stern of a dory when they were three months old --- played over my rocks, or brought me blue-tipped innocence and white violets every year when I returned.

"You come up with the spring flowers," prettily said one imaginative little neighbor, a fisherman's daughter.

Opposite my study windows, cruel and beautiful as any siren of fable, ran the reef of Norman's Woe.

The shore of Fresh Water Cove made a fair, green blush in the gray outline of the stern coast which ran from Norman's Woe to Pavilion Beach. When I rowed, or was rowed, over to it (it was a good pull of a mile and a half or more), if the wind were up, or there were "short chops" upon the harbor, and the landing became a matter of skill, I used always to think of the two lines in an old hymn: --

When the breeze struck from the east or southeast, then the whole length of the western shore of the harbor broke into white fire. Hours were short in watching this blaze of foam. Suddenly it shot up --- call it fifty feet, call it twice that, according to the vigor of the storm --- in jets and great tongues; as if it believed itself able to lick the solid cliffs away. Seen through the shaking window of my throbbing little house, it was easy to believe that it could.

Perhaps the wind fell, but failed to die with the day. Then came on the wonder of a stormy sunset. All Gloucester harbor tossed against it. The bows of the anchored fleet rose and sank angrily. The head-lights came out one by one, and flared, surging up and down. Ten Pound Light flashed out for the night; but her blinder was on, towards us. The little city, glorified now, forgiven of her fish, and her dust, and her bouncing roads, loved and dreamed over, and sung in heart and pen, melted all through her pretty outlines against the massive colors of the west.

Then, off Eastern Point, far to the left, where the shadow fell, sprang out the red, revolving flash of Cape Ann Light.

The fishermen's children are in their beds; the rocks are quiet, but for the cannonade of the surf. Shut away from the world, shut in with the sea, I light my lonely fire, and thank God for my own hearth, and for Gloucester shore.

I had a little dog in those days. With the lady who mothered my home, and the maid who served it, he formed "my family;" we three sat in the windows, and heard the summer people---as they grew, alas, in force---pass by our châlet, chatting busily. Often their talk would be of us.

The name of that dog, by the way, was Daniel Deronda; and one day it fell to me, with my own ears, to overhear these authenticated words : --

"Mamma?" It was a little fellow who spoke, tugging at his mother's fingers as he scrambled over the boulders. "Mamma, I want to know;---is this where the Derondas live?"

Such was human fame; and such will it ever be ! The eyes that see us, see with their own natures and from their own focus; not from ours or with ours. Worse might befall me than to be known as one of the Derondas.

I looked solemnly at the little dog (he was the only masculine member of the household), and said: ---

"It is the doom of women, Dan. Seven pounds of your lordly sex---and with bangs down to his nose, into the bargain --- orders our identity away from us. We must make the best of it, Dan; and you and I know that it's all the same in the end."