than the old mansion just referred to, where Mickley resided from 1842 to 1869.  Musical celebrities from every country hastened to make his acquaintance, and such was the magnetism of his personality that acquaintances thus formed seem never to have been lost sight of by either host or guest.  During his European tour, which lasted from 1869 to 1872, the then venerable traveller was continually meeting friends among persons who had called upon him at various times, dating back in one case as long before as 1820.  They always appeared to have known beforehand of his coming, and he always remembered them and the circumstances under which he had first met them.

The social reunions at Mickley’s were informal to the last degree, and the accommodations correspondingly primitive.  They usually took place in his workshop.  Crazy stools or empty piano-boxes generally served for seats.  The surrounding furniture comprised barrels, cases, and chests, filled to overflowing with the host’s ever-increasing antiquarian treasures.  If a quartette were assembled,—­and many times the musical party was enlarged to a quintette or a septette,—­an adjournment was necessary to a room less crowded, but equally sparse of conventional furniture.

Mr. Mickley was always happy to join in these impromptu musical assemblies, when occasion offered, although performing music was one of the few things which he never succeeded in doing well.  He invariably played the viola on these occasions,—­perhaps, as Schindler hints about Beethoven, because indifferent playing on the viola is not so noticeable as on other instruments.  As was to have been expected from so pronounced an antiquarian, he had small sympathy for modern music.  He even rebelled against the gentle innovations of Mendelssohn, contending, not without an approach to accurate judgment, that Haydn and Mozart had completely covered the field of chamber-music.  While in the midst of numerous and always congenial pursuits during his long life, quartette-playing remained a favorite pastime of very many days in very many years.

Mr. Mickley’s intellect was so many-sided and so evenly balanced that it is difficult to name his predominant bias.  It is very nearly safe, however, to say that this was his historic faculty.  In the writings, still chiefly unprinted, which were left behind him, he was at once the most minute and the most compact of historians.  Emerson never condensed his rare thoughts into smaller compass, not even in his “English Traits,” than Mr, Mickley has condensed his facts and observations.  There is a small pamphlet extant, the manuscript of which was read by him in 1863 on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of a noted Indian massacre in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where several of his ancestors perished.  It contains historic material enough for a volume.  To indicate his early passion for amassing reliable data, the same sketch shows that a portion of its facts had been obtained, while he was still a boy, from then aged eye-witnesses of the affair, nearly fifty years before its story was thus put into permanent shape.