Senator Hoar rather enjoyed calling a man whose acts he disliked by hard names. Indeed he very much enjoyed salty words generally, and one morning ably defended them: “‘Dammit’ is a useful word. It eases one’s feelings.” He also put up a strong argument for “whoppers.” “They are,” he contended, “a valuable weapon with the impertinent and the imbecile.” There was much boyish mischief in him. He greatly admired our wholesome big-hearted Elizabeth, daughter of the house, her common sense and her gaiety, and loved to pinch her plump arm. He did it in the presence of us all and in spite of Mrs. Hoar’s reproaches. “Do you know, Elizabeth,” he said one evening as he followed us up the stairs from the dining room, “that it has taken nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization to produce a man who does not pinch a girl’s pretty ankle when she is going upstairs ahead of him?” In July, 1898, after Congress had adjourned Senator Hoar made up a party for a trip through the Berkshire Hills and I had the good fortune to be asked to join it. I had heard him talk much of his walking trips there in Harvard days with his favorite classmate, Francis Child: “as great a man at seventeen when he entered college,” he said, “as when he died—a real genius.” From the moment our little caravan left his home at Worcester the trip was like champagne to him. Trees, graveyards, epitaphs, views, the homes of the honored in this day and past days kept him busy. There was the Sheffield elm which we must stop to measure, the grave of Mumbet with the inscription his favorite Catharine Sedgwick had written for it; there was the best view of the Sleeping Napoleon on Cedar Mountain—this for me. Then we must spend the night at a certain inn on Mount Washington to give Elizabeth plenty of time to look up family graves and records. Her father had been born on Mount Washington, which was one of many reasons why the Senator admired her. He went with her to look up the graves and, returning late, said, “If we had not feared you would wait supper we would have stayed and been buried there.” I have certainly never known anyone for whom life at seventy was more joyous and full. He hated weakness, as well as everything that impaired his dignity, his self-reliance. He was a true untouchable and would fall into a rage if friend or stranger offered to assist him. “Unhand me,” he thundered at a street car conductor who one day seized his arm to help him up the steps, and his wrath lasted until he had told us about the indignity at the dinner table. On this Berkshire trip a little accident happened to him which caused an explosion of the same nature. We were at an inn in the mountains, and after dinner had gone on to the lawn. The Senator was sitting on a rustic bench which gave way, turned him on his back, feet in the air. We all ran to assist him but were stopped in our tracks by a stentorian voice which roared, “I decline to be assisted.”