few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on the
other side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris always maintain that
wood was and forever would be the most suitable material for building a
house? On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses,
whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge architecture, blown
clean over by the gale. But the gale that will deracinate Cambridge has
not yet begun to rage.... I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow. In
spite of the fact that he wrote "The Wreck of the _Hesperus_," he seems
to keep his position as the chief minor poet of the English language.
And the most American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge was that
the children of Cambridge had been guided to buy and make inalienable
the land in front of his house, so that his descendant might securely
enjoy the free prospect that Longfellow enjoyed. In what other country
would just such a delicate, sentimental homage have been paid in just
such an ingeniously fanciful manner?[1]

[Footnote 1: This story was related to me by a resident of Cambridge.
Mr. Richard H. Dana, Longfellow's son-in-law, has since informed me that
it is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue. It ought to have
been quite true. The land in question was given by Longfellow's children
to the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city of
Cambridge. The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow an
arm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic "spreading
chestnut-tree," under which stood a certain historic village smithy; and
with this I suppose I must be content.--A.B.]

[Illustration: THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB--OVERLOOKING THE RIVER]

After I had passed the Longfellow house it began to rain, and dusk
began to gather in the recesses between the houses; and my memory is
that, with an athletic and tireless companion, I walked uncounted
leagues through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward a promised
club that seemed ever to retreat before us with the shyness of a fawn.
However, we did at length capture it. This club was connected with
Harvard, and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the present
chapter.

* * * * *

The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my recollection as
being among the most characteristic and comfortable of "real" American
phenomena. And one reason why I insisted, in a previous chapter, on the
special Americanism of Indiana