The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a high desk which he sometimes stood at to write.  In this room Washington held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the chamber overhead he slept.  I do not think Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer.  The father of his country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his devotions.  “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at his head.”

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden.  The poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged.  Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence.  There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been there.  Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a design of the poet’s own.  Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe.  He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him.  But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it.  He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it.

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard him tell this story.  The evenings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me.  I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I did not hear it.  The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other than what I have given.  Perhaps it would be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps