ate the meeting; but, owing to changes in
my plans, it remained a study, and was purchased by Judge Hoar, the
most eminent of my companions still to be described. He had been a
justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts,--a man as well known
for his intellectual fibre and sympathy with letters as for his
judicial abilities. He was one of the most brilliant members of the
old Saturday Club, of which ours might be considered the offspring and
succursal; of wit the most spontaneous and electric, whose sallies
burst in the merriment of our _al fresco_ camp dinners with the flash
and surprise of rockets, and left behind them the perfume of erudition
as did no others of the company, not even Lowell's. In my study the
party is divided in the habit of the morning occupations: Lowell,
Hoar, Binney, Woodman, and myself engaged in firing at the target;
Agassiz and Wyman dissecting a trout on a tree-stump, while Holmes
and Dr. Howe watch the operation; but Emerson, recognizing himself as
neither a marksman nor a scientist, choosing a position between the
two groups, pilgrim-staff in hand, watches the marksmen, with a slight
preference as between the two groups. My own figure I painted from a
photograph, the company insisting on my putting myself in; but it was
ill done, for I could never paint from a photograph.

When the company left me I returned to my painting, and remained in
camp as long as the weather permitted. On my return to Cambridge I
became affianced to Miss Mack, the eldest daughter of Dr. David Mack,
with whom I had been boarding while I was occupied in painting the
various pictures of the Oaks at Waverley.

The excursion had been so satisfactory that when the whole company
had come together again, in the autumn, at Cambridge, the formal
organization of the Club was called for, and to the number of those
who had been at Camp Maple there was a large accession of the most
prominent members of the intellectual society of Boston and Cambridge.
It was decided to purchase a tract in the Adirondack Wilderness, the
less accessible the better, and there to build a permanent club-house,
and I was appointed to select the site and lay it out. The meeting was
late in the autumn, and the winter had set in with heavy snow before I
had my orders. I caught a severe cold at New York,--a trivial
matter to notice, but one which very narrowly escaped the gravest
consequences to me; for the cold became aggravated to a bronchial
attac