almost the best ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson's
father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to
apparitions, and so he said simply, "Won't you sit down, father?" The
phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in
taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work. "Ah!"
he said, "I forgot that I was not substance."

I do not know whether "The Old Sergeant" is ever read now; it has
probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am
afraid none of Willson's other verse is remembered. But he was then a
distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our
poets. I did not see him again. Shortly afterwards I heard that he had
left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid
course, for a very little later came the news of his death.




IX.

The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
never let a man keep a cold yet!"

If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge