but there was present one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized then and there.  “Look at him,” he said, from time to time.  “This is the dream of his life,” and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal’s mind.  At a dinner long after in London, where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim shapes of the earlier date had come.  The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the passing years.  The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, “or few or none,” to “shake against the cold,” had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful black.  “He looks,” one of his friends said to another as they walked home together, “like a French marquis of the ancien regime.”  “Yes,” the other assented, thoughtfully, “or like an American actor made up for the part.”

The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte’s nature.  Never was any man less a ‘poseur’; he made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself.  In the course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm.  He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, “Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition; this is the Fleet business over again,” he joyously smote his thigh and crowed out, “Yes, the Fleet!” No doubt he tasted all the delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite unaffected.

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not altogether in the wrong.  If it disabled him for certain experiences of life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent.  It enabled him to do such things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not do,