at
you ever see in your life. He used to say he'd as lief have a tooth
pulled as go anywheres. Always got sick, he said, when he went
away, and never sick when he didn't. Pretty nigh killed himself
goin' about lecterin' two or three winters; talkin' in cold country
lyceums; as he used to say, goin' home to cold parlors and bein'
treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a
cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a
cold in his head as bad as a horse distemper. Then he'd look kind
of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good
women was to him; how one spread an edderdown comforter for him,
and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lecter, and
another one said, 'There, now you smoke that cigar of yours after
the lecter just as if you was at home,'--and if they'd all been
like that, he'd have gone on lecterin' forever; but as it was, he
got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred nateral death to puttin'
himself out of the world by such violent means as lecterin'."

In fact, Holmes is eminently a Bostonian, and has never been really
happy off his native pavements. He, however, studied medicine in Paris
in his youth, and has made one or two visits to Europe since.

The Atlantic Club for a long time furnished Holmes excellent company,
and he in turn furnished the club with the wittiest and most sparkling
talk which this country probably has known:--

"Such jests, that, drained of every joke,
The very bank of language broke;
Such deeds that laughter nearly died
With stitches in his belted side."

Among those who took part in these delightful re-unions were Emerson,
Longfellow, Felton, Holmes, Agassiz, Lowell, Whipple, Motley, Charles
Eliot Norton, Edmund Quincy, Francis H. Underwood, Judge Hoar, J. Elliot
Cabot, and others. Lowell and Holmes were the wits _par excellence_,
though Judge Hoar did not fall far behind. Emerson sat always with a
seraphic smile upon his face, and Longfellow thoroughly enjoyed every
good sally, though not adding to the mirth-making himself. Dr. Appleton,
who met Dr. Holmes at the Saturday Club, writes:--

"Dr. Holmes was highly talkative and agreeable; he converses very
much like the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,--wittily, and in a
literary way, but perhaps with too great an infusion of
physiological and medical metap