afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
earlier ignorance.

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.

The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
the "groves of academe" at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
"Old Harvard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now. It must
have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had
remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with