Still more exotic a figure in Boston than Aldrich was William Morris Hunt—in spite of his temporary association with Harvard College and his Boston marriage. Both he and his wife are constantly to be met in the pages of Mrs. Fields’s journals, from which they emerged with some frequency into her published “Biographical Notes,” even as they have reappeared, with others, on earlier pages of this book.
In other places than Charles Street, Fields and Hunt were often meeting. One brief record of an encounter, at the end of a Saturday Club meeting, should surely be preserved, for all that it suggests of Hunt in amused rebellion against his surroundings.
Sunday, August 26, 1874.—Hunt came to Jamie when the afternoon was nearly ended and asked him to go up to his studio. As they went along, he said, “I’ve made a poem! First time I ever wrote anything in my life. ’Tisn’t long, only four lines, but I’ve got it written down.” Whereat then and there he pulled out his pocketbook and read:
“Boston is a hilly place;
People all are brothers-in-law.
If you or I want something done
They treat us then like mothers-in-law.
“This goes to the tune of Yankee Doodle,” Whereat he sang it out on the public highway. He looked very handsome, was beautifully dressed in brown velvet with a gold chain about his neck, but swore like a trooper and was in one of his most lawless moods.
He gave J. for me a photograph of a marvellous picture which he calls his Persian Sybil, Anahita. I see his wife in it as in so many of his best works. “I don’t mean to do any more portraits,” he said. “When I remember how I have wasted time on an eyebrow because somebody’s 14th cousin thought it ought to turn up a little more—it makes me mad!”