thought him all wrong, but you do not try
improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
wish it.

XII.

After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
agreeable to him.

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
difference--unless he disliked the differer.

For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
home. One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly he
lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his
going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
old study, where he declared with tears that the place was fu