ave been Carlyle but for Emerson? Emerson
found him discouraged, and as he supposed alone, and at the very
beginning led him out of his darkest places.

I think it was on this that Doctor Holmes spoke with a good deal of
feeling about the value of appreciation. He was ready to go back to
tell of the pleasure he had received from persons who had written to
him, even though he did not know them, to say of how much use some
particular line of his had been. Among others he said that Lothrop
Motley had told him that, when he was all worn out in his work in a
country where he had not many friends, and among stupid old manuscript
archives, two lines of Holmes's braced him up and helped him through:

"Stick to your aim: the mongrel's hold will slip,
But only crowbars loose the bulldog's grip."

He was very funny about flattery. "That is the trouble of having so
many friends, everybody flatters you. I do not mean to let them hurt
me if I can help it, and flattery is not necessarily untrue. But you
have to be on your guard when everybody is as kind to you as everybody
is to me."

[Illustration: THE BAY WINDOW IN DOCTOR HOLMES'S STUDY.]

He said, in passing, that Emerson once quoted two lines of his, and
quoted them horribly. They are from the poem called "The Steamboat:"

"The beating of her restless heart,
Still sounding through the storm."

Emerson quoted them thus:

"The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm."

[Illustration: A CORNER IN DOCTOR HOLMES'S STUDY.]

I was curious to know about Doctor Holmes's experience of country
life, he knows all nature's processes so well. So he told me how it
happened that he went to Pittsfield. It seems that, a century and a
half ago, his ancestor, Jacob Wendell, had a royal grant for the whole
township there, with some small exception, perhaps. The place was at
first called Pontoosoc, then Wendelltown, and only afterward got the
name of Pittsfield from William Pitt. One part of the Wendell property
descended to Doctor Holmes's mother. When he had once seen it he was
struck with its beauty and fitness for a country home, and asked her
that he might have it for his own. It was there that he built a house
in which he lived for eight or nine years. He said that the Housatonic
winds backwards and forwards through it, so that to go from one end of
his estate to the other in a straight line required the crossing it
seven times. Here his children grew up