o oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He
was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.

VIII.

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first
came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of
real quality as a poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of "The Old
Sergeant" Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the
civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary
beauty of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded
whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness. He
was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at
Longfellow's, he could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this
was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when
I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.

He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door
to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of
supernatural things. He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters. But none
was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thoug