hat before you ever came into it, Dickens and
Thackeray were both here, that this beautiful old lady who so kindly
smiles on you has smiled on them and on many other great men of letters
long since dead. It is here that they seem most alive. This is the house
where the culture of Boston seems no fad to make a joke about, but a
rare and delicate reality.

This--and Fen Court, the home of that wonderful woman Mrs. Jack
Gardiner, who represents the present worship of beauty in Boston as Mrs.
Fields represents its former worship of literary men. Fen Court is a
house of enchantment, a palace, and Mrs. Gardiner is like a great
princess in it. She has "great possessions" indeed, but her best, to my
mind, is her most beautiful voice, even though I remember her garden by
moonlight with the fountain playing, her books and her pictures, the
Sargent portrait of herself presiding over one of the most splendid of
those splendid rooms, where everything great in old art and new art is
represented. What a portrait it is! Some one once said of Sargent that
"behind the individual he finds the real, and behind the real, a whole
social order."

He has painted "Mrs. Jack" in a tight-fitting black dress with no
ornament but her world-famed pearl necklace round her waist, and on her
shoes rubies like drops of blood. The daring, intellectual face seems to
say: "I have possessed everything that is worth possession, through the
energy and effort and labor of the country in which I was born."

Mrs. Gardiner represents all the _poetry_ of the millionaire.

Mrs. Gardiner's house filled me with admiration, but if I want rest and
peace I just think of the houses of Mrs. James Fields and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. He was another personage in Boston life when I first went there.
Oh, the visits I inflicted on him--yet he always seemed pleased to see
me, the cheery, kind man. It was generally winter when I called on him.
At once it was "four feet upon a fender!" Four feet upon a fender was
his idea of happiness, he told me, during one of these lengthy visits of
mine to his house in Beacon Street.

He came to see us in "Much Ado about Nothing" and, next day sent me some
little volumes of his work with a lovely inscription on the front page.
I miss him very much when I go to Boston now.

In New York, how much I miss Mrs. Beecher I could never say. The
Beechers were the most wonderful pair. What an actor he would have made!
He read scenes from Shakespeare