But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me about my adventures in Concord.  By this time I could see it in a humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it.  He perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only through sympathy with him.  But I thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the magazine.  He seemed to think so too; he said that if the place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later.  He was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.  But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,

“Why, how old are you?”

“I am twenty-three,” I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again.

“Well,” he said, “you begin young, out there!”

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy, I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New England.

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­First Impressions of Literary New York

by William Dean Howells

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK

It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860, which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900.  I used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very personal in the temperature, until nightfall.  What I remember is being high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark, after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its length.  At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this vaster volume of sound, which seemed