the fine flower-garden, feeding the
squirrels, playing with the dogs, and driving the fine horses. He has
many friends within a morning's drive,--Harriet Preston, Gail Hamilton,
and others,--and driving about the country has always been one of his
choice diversions. He is now seventy-eight years old,--a cheerful,
kindly, essentially lovable old man. He still goes up to Boston
occasionally to meet friends and look about the city, and runs over to
Amesbury, where friends occupy his house and make him welcome; but for
the most part he remains in his quiet retreat, cheerfully awaiting the
change which must be near.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

The genial "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" was born in the city of
Cambridge, in Massachusetts, in the year 1809, upon the day given to the
Commencement exercises of Harvard College. It was the day of small
things in that institution, and the day of small things in American
literature. The child who was born that day was destined to add much to
the estimation in which both were held. He occupied a professor's chair
in the University for thirty-five years, and did good work in it too;
and he is one of the little group of illustrious men who have helped to
make a distinctively American literature, which is now honored
throughout the world. As we believe with Dr. Holmes that "it is an
ungenerous silence which leaves all the fair words of honestly-earned
praise to the writer of obituary notices and the marble-worker," we
shall endeavor to set forth in this paper some of the good points in the
character and work of this distinguished man,--perhaps the best beloved
of our native authors.

The Rev. Abiel Holmes, the father of our hero, was one of the typical
New England ministers of that day; the mother, Sarah Wendell, was from a
Dutch family, who came to Boston from Albany in the eighteenth century.
The old gambrel-roofed house where the poet was born stood close to the
buildings of Harvard University, and to the south flows the Charles
River, so often celebrated by Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell. The
environs of Cambridge are particularly beautiful, and have been the
subjects of many charming descriptions by all these writers. The old
yellow hip-roofed house was about one hundred and sixty years old when
it was moved away to make room for modern improvements. The New England
colonists knew how to build a house, and the work of their hands puts