His father's family was at this time living in the house No. 7 Walnut
Street, looking down Chestnut Street over the water to the western hills.
Near by, at the corner of Beacon Street, was the residence of the family
of the first mayor of Boston, and at a little distance from the opposite
corner was the house of one of the fathers of New England manufacturing
enterprise, a man of superior intellect, who built up a great name and
fortune in our city. The children from these three homes naturally
became playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and
Lothrop and two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their
schemes of amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a
prescient glance could have looked into that garret on some Saturday
afternoon while our century was not far advanced in its second score of
years, he might have found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed
hats, heroes and bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas.
In one of the boys he would have seen the embryo dramatist of a nation's
life history, John Lothrop Motley; in the second, a famous talker and wit
who has spilled more good things on the wasteful air in conversation than
would carry a "diner-out" through half a dozen London seasons, and waked
up somewhat after the usual flowering-time of authorship to find himself
a very agreeable and cordially welcomed writer,--Thomas Gold Appleton.
In the third he would have recognized a champion of liberty known
wherever that word is spoken, an orator whom to hear is to revive all the
traditions of the grace, the address, the commanding sway of the silver-
tongued eloquence of the most renowned speakers,--Wendell Phillips.

Both of young Motley's playmates have furnished me with recollections of
him and of those around him at this period of his life, and I cannot do
better than borrow freely from their communications. His father was a
man of decided character, social, vivacious, witty, a lover of books, and