of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it
down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he
did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of
wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and
then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, "I
commonly do that the first time," as if it were a frequent habit with
him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He
had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.

VIII.

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
House