ybe I had seen an apparition, but
it was not so, she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other
Mary, the original Mary. That Mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and
presently sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young
and was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty
souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and
lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips
for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent
hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them
with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and
dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly
after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears
running down; and finally Mary said suddenly, and without any leading
up--

"Tell me! What is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?"

It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so
inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a
stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set
me to musing--thinking--searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The
peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a
dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a sudden I knew! and
far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur, "Dey
eats 'em guts and all!"

"At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?"

But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] That house still stands.

IV.

... But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of
Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was
very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where I
had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square
was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh,
his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing
inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. His long face and lank
hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to
fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it
seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and
focalize them upon Stevenson's special distinction and commanding
feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a s