white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He
still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not
to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had
since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting