he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the
smile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, that
time." At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of
suggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?"

Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
knowledge of it except that it had been Washington's headquarters. Of
course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was
daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such
common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited
parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected
the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have
chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to
vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general
regard to the public welfare.

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems
always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think
Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and
them. I never heard from him anything that was 'de haut en bas', when he
spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of
contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not
like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
Longfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have
been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an
entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any
company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him
patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and
one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at