carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation
between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly
pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they
were on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet
magpie or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the
G. P. R. Jameses passed off together.

There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons
attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose
burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web
our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who
had become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of
letters in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young
men; melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca
only, but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received
them all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not have a
drunken man politer than I," he once answered me, when I asked him why
he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to
those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not;
but later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool
consulate, I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and
strays who drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with
more humanity and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made
them tremble, but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but
he never flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have
loved his fellow-creatures.

Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply
interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could
not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the