felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.

Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
had just published his "Marble Faun," and who had recently come home on
the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't know
that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room
with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel."

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to
probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best
to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond
of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the
dinner-bell." What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in
courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
the dinner 'a la Russe', as it was then called, only from books; and it
was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.