the earliest days of his marriage, and accepted the result without criticism.  But the white serge was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.  The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors’ hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington.  Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head.  It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.

It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful.  The red and the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could not do.  His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered to him if he had known it.  In his London sojourn he had formed the top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.

He disliked clubs; I don’t know whether he belonged to any in New York, but I never met him in one.  As I have told, he himself had formed the Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.  There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I alone came.  We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects.  Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it.  He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it.  The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.  But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter.  It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy