the place,
visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William
Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a
youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his
cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The
Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a
chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the
Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that
there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house--and there may be
to-day, for all I know."

For fifty years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of
Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like.
Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had
not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay
was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen
years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he
was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good hunting, as
well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose memory is
now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge
Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became both mistress and
owner of the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the
house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the
Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on
the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns,
to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and
read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly
terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than
would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new
and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her
presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel
Higginson has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more grateful
to any one than to this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a
neighbour to me, an awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner
from myself and make me available to other people."

Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a
college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to
share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of u