wer of
the _Arena_, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she
was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.

By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of
the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres"
and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a
performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed
no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures
filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and
our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought
back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he
had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty
propaganda!

To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my
student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr.
Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain,
were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with
wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as
boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to
have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to
imagine it wider than it was.

Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or
receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a
swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without
making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the
unimportant events of the past.

Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and
Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather
drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the
University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had
supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were
hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking
up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing
_The Atlantic Monthly_, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my
own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon
Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had
utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would
have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New
York, I confe