His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still.  Hard upon my return from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man came in for the doctor’s help as a physician, though he looked so very well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.  The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street.  “And if you don’t know where Washington Street is,” he said, with a gay burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man’s face, “you don’t know anything.”

We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made me tell him in some detail.  He was especially interested in what I had to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and supplies.  The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy two cents’ worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards barbarism.

The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for every one.  No doubt he knew it, for what that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing.  This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright.  I remember the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, “Holmes, you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.”  “I am, I am,” said the doctor.  “From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive, I’m alive!” Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he had in recognizing the fact.  He could not be with you a moment without shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind.  His gaiety of heart could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked.  He gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had