with an occasional
lecture on grape-culture. He permitted my sister and me to climb the
fence and eat all the grapes we could hold; it seems to me he could
hardly have realized our capacity. During our second summer he built a
most elaborate fence along the road-front of his estate; it must have
been three hundred yards long and it was as high as a man could reach;
the palings, instead of being upright, were criss-crossed over one
another, leaving small diamond-shaped interstices. The whole was painted
brilliant white, to match the liliputian cottage in which the Bull
family contrived (I know not how) to ensconce itself. When the fence was
built, Mr. Bull would every day come forth and pace slowly up and down
the road, contemplating it with the pride of a parent; indeed, it was no
puny achievement, and when I revisited Concord, thirty years later,
the great white fence was still there, with a few gaps in it, but still
effective. But the builder, and the grapes--where were they? Where are
Cheops, and the hanging gardens of Babylon?

Among many visitors came Richard Henry Stoddard, already a poet, but
anxious to supplement the income from his verses by a regular stipend
from the big pocket of Uncle Sam. His first coming was in summer, and
he and my father went up on the hill and sat in the summer-house there,
looking out upon the wide prospect of green meadows and distant woods,
but probably seeing nothing of them, their attention being withdrawn to
scenes yet fairer in the land of imagination and memory. Stoddard was
then, as always, a handsome man, strong and stanch, black-haired and
black-bearded, with strong eyes that could look both fierce and tender.
He was masculine, sensitive, frank, and humorous; his chuckle had
infinite merriment in it; but, as his mood shifted, there might be
tears in his eyes the next moment. He was at that time little more
than five-and-twenty years old, and he looked hardly that; he was a New
England country youth of genius. Nature had kindled a fire in him which
has never gone out. Like my father, he was affiliated with the sea, and
had its freshness and daring, though combined with great modesty, and he
felt honored by the affection with which he inspired the author of The
Scarlet Letter. It was not until his second visit, in the winter,
that the subject of a custom-house appointment for him came up; for my
father, being known as a close friend of the President, whose biography
he had wri