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