his convictions less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence
from liquor and tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar,
and it once came about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace
Mann's hearing. The reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I
understand you to say, Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?"
"Yes, I smoke a cigar once in a while," replied my father,
comfortably. Horace Mann could not keep his seat; he started up and
paced the room menacingly. He had a high admiration for my father's
genius, and a deep affection for him as a man, and this infidelity to
the true faith seemed to him the more appalling. But he would be true
to his colors at all costs, and after a few moments he planted
himself, tall and tragic, before his interlocutor, and spoke, in a
husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr. Hawthorne, it is my duty to
tell you that I no longer have the same respect for you that I have
had." Then he turned and strode from the room, leaving the
excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are the wounds of a
friend, and my father was as much touched as he was amused by this
example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a great vacuum in
the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have been; but there
are a time and place for such men as he, and more than once the men
without sense of humor have moved the world.

In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom,
indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly
pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading
energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of
the first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she
had lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her
letters from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was
then a young woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion,