Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
killed her, but it was worth it.

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At
first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a
while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone
promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like
effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
him.

He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the