At bedtime my wig must come off and a nightcap take the place.  In the morning that wig must go on, with never one look in the glass.  Soon two persons called, both leaders in social life, one of them a physician, who had suddenly lost every spear of hair.  I was invited by the unfortunate physician and his wife to dine with them.  And, in his own home, I noticed in their parlour a portrait of him before his experience.  He had been blessed with magnificently thick black hair, a handsome face, adorned with a full beard and moustache.  It was an April evening and the weather was quite warm, and after dinner the doctor removed his wig, placing it on a plaster head.  He was now used to his affliction.  He told me, as he sat smoking, looking like a waxwork figure, how several years ago he awoke in the dead of the night to find something he could not understand on his pillow.  He roused his wife, lit the gas, dashed cold water on his face to help him to realize what had happened and washed off all the rest of his hair, even to eyebrows and eyelashes.  That was a depressing story to me.  And I soon met a lady (the Mayor’s wife) who had suffered exactly in the same way.  She also was resigned, as indeed she had to be.  I began to tremble lest my own hair should never return.

But I should be telling you about St. Louis.  We were most cordially received by clergymen from three churches and all the professors at the university, and the trustees with their wives and daughters.  Wyman Crow, a trustee, was the generous patron of Harriet Hosmer, whose Zenobia was at that time on exhibition there.  The Mary Institute was founded in remembrance of Rev. Dr. Eliot’s daughter Mary, who while skating over one of the so-called “sink-holes,” then existing about the city, broke the ice, fell in, and the body was never recovered.  These sink holes were generally supposed to be unfathomable.

Since I could not dance, I took to art, although I had no more capacity in that direction than a cow.  I attempted a bunch of dahlias, but when I offered the result to a woman cleaning our rooms she looked at it queerly, held it at a distance, and then inquired:  “Is the frame worth anything?”

I acknowledge a lifelong indebtedness to Chancellor Hoyt.  He was suffering fearfully with old-fashioned consumption, but he used to send for me to read to him to distract his thoughts.  He would also criticize my conversation, never letting one word pass that was ungrammatical or incorrectly pronounced.  If I said, “I am so glad,” he would ask, “So glad that what?  You don’t give the correlative.”  He warned against reliance on the aid of alliteration.  The books read to him were discussed and the authors praised or criticized.

St. Louis was to me altogether delightful, and I still am interested in that city, so enlarged and improved.  I used to see boys riding astride razor-back hogs in the street, where now stately limousines glide over smooth pavements.