He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I first knew him in Cambridge.  He had the same brisk, light step, and though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of a young man’s.  I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old.  At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, was still “You young dog” to him.  It was a bright and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws.  He wished apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially.  He betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see by means of an English acquaintance.  He had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he had to gratify in that way.

He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight terminate in Lord Percy’s coming

     “To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.”

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards quite for literary reasons.  He said, No, let it stand, and let them make the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who are not gingerly with other people’s sensibilities came from the frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose.  He said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he spoke it.