“These letters, you mean?” he said, as the boy pointed to some letters on his desk unopened.  “Oh, yes!  They must have come in a later mail.  Well, if it will make you feel any better I’ll go through them, and you can go through my books if you like.  I’ll trust you,” he added laughingly, as Wendell Phillips’s advice occurred to him.

“You like books, you say?” he went on, as he opened his letters.  “Well, then, you must come into my library here at any time you are in Boston, and spend a morning reading anything I have that you like.  Young men do that, you know, and I like to have them.  What’s the use of good friends if you don’t share them?  There’s where the pleasure comes in.”

He asked the boy then about his newspaper work, how much it paid him, and whether he felt it helped him in an educational way.  The boy told him he thought it did; that it furnished good lessons in the study of human nature.  “Yes,” he said, “I, can believe that, so long as it is good journalism.”

As he let the boy out of his house, at the end of that first, meeting, he said to him: 

“And you’re going from me now to see Emerson?  I don’t know,” he added reflectively, “whether you will see him at his best.  Still, you may.  And even if you do not, to have seen him, even as you may see him, is better, in a way, than not to have seen him at all.”

Edward did not know what Phillips Brooks meant.  But he was, sadly, to find out the next day.

A boy was pretty sure of a welcome from Louisa Alcott, and his greeting from her was spontaneous and sincere.

“Why, you good boy,” she said, “to come all the way to Concord to see us,” quite for all the world as if she were the one favored.  “Now take your coat off, and come right in by the fire.  Do tell me all about your visit.”

Before that cozy fire they chatted.  It was pleasant to the boy to sit there with that sweet-faced woman with those kindly eyes!  After a while she said:  “Now I shall put on my coat and hat, and we shall walk over to Emerson’s house.  I am almost afraid to promise that you will see him.  He sees scarcely any one now.  He is feeble, and—­” She did not finish the sentence.  “But we’ll walk over there, at any rate.”

She spoke mostly of her father as the two walked along, and it was easy to see that his condition was now the one thought of her life.  Presently they reached Emerson’s house, and Miss Emerson welcomed them at the door.  After a brief chat Miss Alcott told of the boy’s hope.  Miss Emerson shook her head.

“Father sees no one now,” she said, “and I fear it might not be a pleasure if you did see him.”

Then Edward told her what Phillips Brooks had said.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll see.”

She had scarcely left the room when Miss Alcott rose and followed her, saying to the boy:  “You shall see Mr. Emerson if it is at all possible.”