asking the various guests, in his humorously hectoring manner, what they would do in certain dire contingencies: if they were to encounter a pirate in the Back Bay, etc., etc. Each time Holmes capped the answer with a better one, till he came to Aldrich.

"Aldrich," said he, "what would you do if one day on Mount Vernon Street you were to meet a cannibal?" "Why," said Aldrich, "I should stop and pick an acquaintance!"

At another dinner, in honor of Lord Houghton, Aldrich chanced to be seated beside the chief guest, and, presently, he noticed that Houghton had mislaid his napkin and was vainly looking for it. Aldrich, observing that it had fallen to the floor, picked it up and restored it to the noble bard, quoting, as he did so, two lines from one of his lordship's poems:

"A man's best things are nearest him

Lie close about his feet."

Perhaps the most telling feature of Aldrich's humor was its marvellous readiness. Coming home late one night, he noticed a light still burning in the study of Booth's house on Chestnut Street. Approaching a window, he tapped lightly on the pane; no response. Again he tapped: suddenly the door sprang open and out rushed the tragedian, hair rumpled and eyes wild, a navy revolver, at full cock, in his hand.

"Hello, Ned," said Aldrich, "going hunting? I'll lend you Trip."

Often his wit had at once a classic precision of form, a core of sound sense, and a saucy disrespectfulness that were to the last degree telling. A friend once remarked to him that a certain eminent and indefatigable laborer in the field of letters was a very learned man.

"Yes," said Aldrich, "a very learned man, but like a gas-pipe, no richer for the illumination he has conveyed."

We have had numerous witty men given to a more rollicking humor, but scarcely another so choicely gifted in oral phrase, so airy and nimble in fancy, so happily and continuously witty through all his waking hours. There was no exaggeration in what Mark Twain has written of him: "Aldrich was always brilliant, he could n't help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking, you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him; when he speaks, the diamonds flash."

In the spring of 1890, after nine years in the editorial chair, Aldrich concluded that the time had come to enjoy a larger leisure. Resigning the post permanently to Horace Scudder, who had often occupied it during his summers in Europe, he sailed for the East, free of all ties; and manuscripts and "make-up" troubled him no more.

CHAPTER VII

INDIAN SUMMER DAYS

1890-1900

OT long after his release from the "Atlantic" Aldrich

No

wrote in the postscript of a friendly letter, "What a blessed relief it is not to make a hundred bitter enemies per month by declining MSS. I am so happy these days that I sometimes half suspect some calamity lurking round the corner." The calamity was to be long deferred. The death of many of his friends of old time brought him hours of sorrow, and made him aware, as he many times writes in his correspondence, "What a slight hold we have on this revolving globe." Yet the years from 1890 to 1900 were perhaps the happiest of his life. They passed in a bland and mellow light as of a land where it seemed always afternoon.

The memorabilia of these years are few. The Aldriches were abroad in the summers of 1890, 1891, and 1892. In the summer of 1893 they built "The Crags" at Tenant's Harbor on the Maine coast, a summer place that the poet came to be immensely fond of. In the winter of 1894-95 they went around the world. In the winter of 1898-99 they went again around the world; and they were in Europe in the summer of 1900. Despite this far-darting travel and