On reaching home, I read my note and found it was Friday the 16th, not the 9th, I was invited for….
Dear Mr. Fields, I shall be very happy to come to your home on Friday evening, the 16th February, at 8 o'clock, to meet yourself and Mrs. Fields and hear Mr. James read his paper on Emerson. Always truly yours,
O. W. HOLMES. On occasions of social dignity few men have ever surpassed Dr. Holmes in grace of compliment and perfection of easy ceremony. It was an acquired gift; perhaps it always must be. But as soon as human nature was given a chance to show itself, he was always eager, bringing an unsated store of intellectual curiosity to bear upon every new person or condition. He was generous to a fault in showing his own hand, moving with "infinite jest" over the current of his experiences until he could tempt his interlocutor out upon the same dangerous waters. If others were slow to embark, he nevertheless interested them in the history of his own voyage of life.
Dr. Holmes had never known any very difficult hand to hand struggle with life, but he was quite satisfied with its lesser difficulties. He could laugh at his own want of courage, as he called a certain lack of love for adventure, and he could admire the daring of others. He was happy in the circle of his home affections, and never cared to stray faraway. He had a golden sense of comfort in his home life, an entire satisfaction, which made his rare absences a penance. Added to this was his tendency to asthma, from which he suffered often very severely. In a letter written in 1867 from Montreal, whither he had gone to obtain a copyright of one of his books, we can see how his domestic habits, as well as his asthma, made any long absence intolerable to him.
MONTREAL, October 23, 1867.
Dear Mr. Fields:… I am as comfortable here as I can be, but I have earned my money, for I have had a full share of my old trouble.
Last night was better, and to-day I am going about the town. Miss Frothingham sent me a basket of black Hamburg grapes to-day, which were very grateful after the hotel tea and coffee and other 'pothecary's stuff.
Don't talk to me about taverns! There is just one genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to be had in them,—namely, a boiled egg. The soups taste pretty good sometimes, but their sources are involved in a darker mystery than that of the Nile. Omelettes taste as if they had been carried in the waiter's hat, or fried in an old boot. I ordered scrambled eggs one day. It must be that they had been scrambled for by somebody, but who—who in the possession of a sound reason could have scrambled for what I had set before me under that name? Butter! I am thinking just now of those exquisite little pellets I have so often seen at your table, and wondering why the taverns always keep it until it is old. Fool that I am! As if the taverns did not know that if it was good it would be eaten, which is not what they want. Then the waiters, with their napkins,—what don't they do with those napkins! Mention any one thing of which you think you can say with truth, "That they do not do."…
I have a really fine parlor, but every time I enter it I perceive that
"Still, sad 'odor' of humanity"