The three children born to him were Oliver Wendell, Amelia Jackson, and Edward. They all live near the old home, and the second generation is beginning to be a prominent factor in the family affairs. The daughter is Mrs. John T. Sargent, of Beverly Farms, near Boston, where Dr. Holmes has passed the summer months for several years past. All readers will remember the Doctor's famous "Hunt after the Captain," published in the "Atlantic" during the war, and the thrilling interest the country took in it. The "Captain" was the elder son, then just graduated from Harvard, and belonging to the Fourth Battalion of Infantry. He was thrice wounded, and the terror and anxiety of his friends at home cannot be described in words. He is now an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts.
For a few years Dr. Holmes was much in demand as a lecturer; but he never enjoyed that business very well, and after a while refused to go upon any terms. In 1856 he thus defined his terms to an applicant for a lecture:—
"My terms, when I stay over night, are fifteen dollars and expenses, a room with a fire in it, in a public-house, and a mattress to sleep on,—not a feather-bed. As you write in your individual capacity, I tell you at once all my habitual exigencies. I am afraid to sleep in a cold room; I can't sleep on a feather-bed; I will not go to private houses."
In the "Autocrat" there is an account of his lecturing experiences by the landlady, which gives a pretty good idea of some of his personal traits:—
"He was a man who loved to stick around home, as much as any cat you ever see in your life. He used to say he'd as lief have a tooth pulled as go anywheres. Always got sick, he said, when he went away, and never sick when he didn't. Pretty nigh killed himself goin' about lecterin' two or three winters; talkin' in cold country lyceums; as he used to say, goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as a horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an edderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lecter, and another one said, 'There, now you smoke that cigar of yours after the lecter just as if you was at home,'—and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecterin' forever; but as it was, he got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecterin'."
In fact, Holmes is eminently a Bostonian, and has never been really happy off his native pavements. He, however, studied medicine in Paris in his youth, and has made one or two visits to Europe since.
The Atlantic Club for a long time furnished Holmes excellent company, and he in turn furnished the club with the wittiest and most sparkling talk which this country probably has known:—
"Such jests, that, drained of every joke,
The very bank of language broke;
Such deeds that laughter nearly died
With stitches in his belted side."
Among those who took part in these delightful re-unions were Emerson, Longfellow, Felton, Holmes, Agassiz, Lowell, Whipple, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Edmund Quincy, Francis H. Underwood, Judge Hoar, J. Elliot Cabot, and others. Lowell and Holmes were the wits par excellence, though Judge Hoar did not fall far behind. Emerson sat always with a seraphic smile upon his face, and Longfellow thoroughly enjoyed every good sally, though not adding to the mirth-making himself. Dr. Appleton, who met Dr. Holmes at the Saturday Club, writes:—