Surrounded by the portraits of those I have long counted my friends, I
like to chat with the people about me concerning these pictures, my
companions on the wall, and the men and women they represent. These are
my assembled guests, who dropped in years ago and stayed with me,
without the form of invitation or demand on my time or thought. They are
my eloquent silent partners for life, and I trust they will dwell here
as long as I do. Some of them I have known intimately; several of them
lived in other times; but they are all my friends and associates in a
certain sense.

To converse with them and of them--


"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past"--


is one of the delights of existence, and I am never tired of answering
questions about them, or gossiping of my own free will as to their
every-day life and manners.

If I were to call the little collection in this diminutive house a
_Gallery of Pictures_, in the usual sense of that title, many would
smile and remind me of what Foote said with his characteristic sharpness
of David Garrick, when he joined his brother Peter in the wine trade:
"Davy lived with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself
a wine merchant."

My friends have often heard me in my "garrulous old age" discourse of