It was indeed a privilege for a young American, on his first travels abroad, to have “Barry Cornwall” for his host in London.  As I recall the memorable days and nights of that long-ago period, I wonder at the good fortune which brought me into such relations with him, and I linger with profound gratitude over his many acts of unmerited kindness.  One of the most intimate rambles I ever took with him was in 1851, when we started one morning from a book-shop in Piccadilly, where we met accidentally.  I had been in London only a couple of days, and had not yet called upon him for lack of time.  Several years had elapsed since we had met, but he began to talk as if we had parted only a few hours before.  At first I thought his mind was impaired by age, and that he had forgotten how long it was since we had spoken together.  I imagined it possible that he mistook me for some one else; but very soon I found that his memory was not at fault, for in a few minutes he began to question me about old friends in America, and to ask for information concerning the probable sea-sick horrors of an Atlantic voyage.  “I suppose,” said he, “knowing your infirmity, you found it hard work to stand on your immaterial legs, as Hood used to call Lamb’s quivering limbs.”  Sauntering out into the street, he went on in a quaintly humorous way to imagine what a rough voyage must be to a real sufferer, and thus walking gayly along, we came into Leadenhall Street.  There he pointed out the office where his old friend and fellow-magazinist, “Elia,” spent so many years of hard work from ten until four o’clock of every day.  Being in a mood for reminiscence, he described the Wednesday evenings he used to spend with “Charles and Mary” and their friends around the old “mahogany-tree” in Russell Street.  I remember he tried to give me an idea of how Lamb looked and dressed, and how he stood bending forward to welcome his guests as they arrived in his humble lodgings.  Procter thought nothing unimportant that might serve in any way to illustrate character, and so he seemed to wish that I might get an exact idea of the charming person both of us prized so ardently and he had known so intimately.  Speaking of Lamb’s habits, he said he had never known his friend to drink immoderately except upon one occasion, and he observed that “Elia,” like Dickens, was a small and delicate eater.  With faltering voice he told me of Lamb’s “givings away” to needy, impoverished friends whose necessities were yet greater than his own.  His secret charities were constant and unfailing, and no one ever suffered hunger when he was by.  He could not endure to see a fellow-creature in want if he had the means to feed him.  Thinking, from a depression of spirits which Procter in his young manhood was once laboring under, that perhaps he was in want of money, Lamb looked him earnestly in the face as they were walking one day in the country together, and blurted out, in his stammering way, “My dear boy, I have a hundred-pound note in my desk that I really don’t know what to do with:  oblige me by taking it and getting the confounded thing out of my keeping.”  “I was in no need of money,” said Procter, “and I declined the gift; but it was hard work to make Lamb believe that I was not in an impecunious condition.”