Or the request for his funniest lecture for the benefit of a hearse in a rural hamlet!

His experience in a little village where he and Mrs. Fields wanted to find a boarding-house:  The lady of the house demurred; she had “got pretty tired of boarders,” but at last capitulated with, “Well, I’ll let you come in if you’ll do your own stretching.”  This proved to mean no waitress at the table.

The morning after their arrival, he went out for a long walk in the mountain air, and returning was accosted by his host:  “I see you are quite a predestinarian.”  As he was resting on one of the wooden chairs, the man said:  “I got those chairs for piazzary purposes,” and enlarged on the trouble of getting good help in haying time:  “Why, my neighbour, Jake Stebbins, had a boy in his gang named Henry Ward Beecher Gooley.  He was so dreadful pious that on extra hot mornings he’d call ’em all together at eleven o’clock and ask ’em to join in singing, ‘Lord, Dismiss us with Thy Blessing.’”

All these anecdotes were told to me by Mr. Fields and I intend to give only those memories which are my own.

Mr. Fields was wonderfully kind to budding authors.  Professor Brown sent him, without my knowledge, my two-column appreciation of dear Tom Hood, after his memorials were written by his son and daughter.  And before many weeks came a box of his newest books for me, with a little note on finest paper and wide margin, “hoping that your friendship may always be continued towards our house.”

I cannot speak of Mr. Fields and fail to pay my tribute of loving admiration to his wife, Annie Fields.  When I first met that lady in her home at 148 Charles Street, she was so exquisitely dainty, refined, spirituelle, and beautiful, I felt, as I expressed it, “square-toed and common.”  She was sincerely cordial to all who were invited to that sacred shrine; she was the perfect hostess and housekeeper, the ever-busy philanthropist, a classic poet, a strong writer of prose when eager to aid some needed reform.  Never before had I seen such a rare combination of the esthetic and practical, and she shone wherever placed.  Once when she was with us, I went up to her room to see if I could help her as she was leaving.  She was seated on the floor, pulling straps tightly round some steamer rugs and a rainy day coat, and she explained she always attended to such “little things.”  As one wrote of her, after her death, she made the most of herself, but she made more of her husband.  Together they went forward, side by side, to the last, comrades and true lovers.

Two of all the wonderful literary treasures in their drawing-room produced a great impression on me, one a caricature of Thackeray’s face done by himself with no mercy shown to his flattened, broken nose.  A lady said to him:  “There is only one thing about you I could never get over, your nose.”  “No wonder, madam, there is no bridge to it.”  The other was an invitation to supper in Charles Lamb’s own writing, and at the bottom of the page, “Puns at nine.”