This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known.  I kept on printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it (not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew up under my hand.  My associations personally were of the most agreeable kind.  I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an end.

I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going abroad.  I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned high, to my heart’s content, of literary things with them and him.

With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.  There was another house which we much resorted to—­the house of James Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died.  I had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could not extinguish in him.  It was a veritable passion, which I used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.  There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest of his life in his own country.  There was one evening when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we all went into the library, something tragical happened.  Edwin Booth was of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves.  “Whose hand is this, Lorry?” he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in both his own hands.  Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, “whose hand is this?” Then there was nothing for Graham but to say, “It’s Lincoln’s hand,” and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly down without a word.

V.