s does not envy him the
memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay
House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancee; Levi
Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall,
Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must
have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented
young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and
dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which
then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality!
What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might
tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the
deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with
her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her
soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and
Sisters," as this group of young people was called.

[Illustration: OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.]

Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later
assembled in this same room--Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton,
Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow,
listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor
Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of
dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and
he retained, as professor, some of his early habits--seldom being seated
while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his
college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has
related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the _Harvard
Graduates Magazine_ (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old
place, printed in a recent number of the _Radcliffe Magazine_, many of
the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was
allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had
an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some
accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company
as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling
his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be
startling.

During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had
with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had