He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it.  He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and forgetfully wore them throughout the evening.  That hospitable soul of Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously providing out of his destitution.  Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul.  The truth is, there was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; 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