pe, and though I never heard him
profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
listener's surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he
liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and
he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he
had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children
in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were
something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had
also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which
pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked
giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he
masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early
kindness for them.

IV.

In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the
storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that
he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no
longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He pr