which clings to it from my predecessor. Mr. Hogan got home yesterday, I believe. I saw him for the first time to-day. He was civil—they all are civil. I have no fault to find except with taverns here and pretty much everywhere.
Every six months a tavern should burn to the ground, with all its traps, its "properties," its beds and pots and kettles, and start afresh from its ashes like John Phoenix-Squibob.
No; give me home, or a home like mine, where all is clean and sweet, where coffee has preëxisted in the berry, and tea has still faint recollections of the pigtails that dangled about the plant from which it was picked, where butter has not the prevailing character which Pope assigned to Denham, where soup could look you in the face if it had "eyes" (which it has not), and where the comely Anne or the gracious Margaret takes the place of these napkin-bearing animals.
Enough! But I have been forlorn and ailing and fastidious—but I am feeling a little better, and can talk about it. I had some ugly nights tell you; but I am writing in good spirits, as you see. I have written once before to Low, as I think I told you, and on the 25th mean to go to a notary with Mr. Dawson, as he tells me it is the right thing to do.
Yours always, O. W. H.
P. S. Made a pretty good dinner, after all; but better a hash at home than a roast with strangers.
With much the same experience of asthma as a result, he visited
Princeton three or four years later, and wrote after his return:—
296 BEACON STREET, August 24, 1871.
My dear Fields:… I only sat up one whole night, it is true, which was a great improvement on Montreal; but I do not feel right yet, and it is quite uncertain whether I shall be in a condition to enjoy the club by Saturday. So if I come, all the better for me; and if I don't come, you can say that you have in your realm at Parker's not "five hundred as good as he," but a score or so that will serve your turn.
I cut the first leaves I wanted to meddle with in the last "Atlantic" for No. IX. of the "Whispering Gallery," and took it all down like an oyster in the height of the season. It is captivating, like all the rest. Why don't you make a book as big as Allibone's out of your store of unparalleled personal recollections? It seems too bad to keep them for posterity. When I think of your bequeathing them for the sole benefit of people that are unborn, I want to cry out with Horace:—