presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it
only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as
he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while
yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's
desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it
was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and
meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a
Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a
danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I
reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith
in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief