gh the
dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.

He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
his prime.

For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
Charles rippling out into