ere Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
book, and not liked him. "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
this was by all means my own understanding too.

His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. "And
if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay burst
at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face, "you
don't know anything."

We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
barbarism.

The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it,