morning I found him as early as four o’clock reading a favorite poem, on Solitude, a piece he very much admired.  That morning I shall not soon forget, for he was in the vein for autobiographical talk, and he gave me a most interesting account of his father, the sea-captain, who died of the yellow-fever in Surinam in 1808, and of his beautiful mother, who dwelt a secluded mourner ever after the death of her husband.  Then he told stories of his college life, and of his one sole intimate, Franklin Pierce, whom he loved devotedly his life long.

In the early period of our acquaintance he much affected the old Boston Exchange Coffee-House in Devonshire Street, and once I remember to have found him shut up there before a blazing coal-fire, in the “tumultuous privacy” of a great snow-storm, reading with apparent interest an obsolete copy of the “Old Farmer’s Almanac,” which he had picked up about the house.  He also delighted in the Old Province House, at that time an inn, kept by one Thomas Waite, whom he has immortalized.  After he was chosen a member of the Saturday Club he came frequently to dinner with Felton, Longfellow, Holmes, and the rest of his friends, who assembled once a month to dine together.  At the table, on these occasions, he was rather reticent than conversational, but when he chose to talk it was observed that the best things said that day came from him.

As I turn over his letters, the old days, delightful to recall, come back again with added interest.

“I sha’n’t have the new story,” he says in one of them, dated from Lenox on the 1st of October, 1850, “ready by November, for I am never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me,—­multiplying and brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby enough after all.

“I am beginning to puzzle myself about a title for the book.  The scene of it is in one of those old projecting-stoned houses, familiar to my eye in Salem; and the story, horrible to say, is a little less than two hundred years long; though all but thirty or forty pages of it refer to the present time.  I think of such titles as ‘The House of the Seven Gables,’ there being that number of gable-ends to the old shanty; or ‘The Seven-Gabled House’; or simply ‘The Seven Gables.’  Tell me how these strike you.  It appears to me that the latter is rather the best, and has the great advantage that it would puzzle the Devil to tell what it means.”

A month afterwards he writes further with regard to “The House of the Seven Gables,” concerning the title to which he was still in a quandary:—­