ttles of wine. There was always a bottle of red
wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do
the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
our own table.

X.

It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we
should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not
well understand it myself. But if he resented it, he never showed his
resentment. As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he
used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too
ethereal for remembrance. The last time I met him was at Lowell's
funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people
do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the
friend we mourned.

My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the
Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose
chimney-tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the
leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. He was one of the
first of my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages
to count against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my
youth in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a most gentle
and kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted
till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its
interests. As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of
the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a
heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the
South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In this
temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the
doctor's insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with
him, and refused even to answer his letters.