the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam," he
could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
pseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life."

The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so
refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are
every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
prospered them.

Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked
himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already
been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
him, he said, "why, you couldn't st