Dr. Holmes wanted, not big front windows from which to study the Bostonians, but a big bay-window at the back, from which he could see the ducks and gulls and think how like to human nature are all their little lives and loves and sorrows. So little is there in his work of what is personal, that it is possible there are people--in England--who really think the “Autocrat” dwelt in the boarding-house of his books. But those who believe with him that, as a rule, genius means ancestors, are not surprised to know that Dr. Holmes himself had many more than the average allowance of ancestors, and that, as a descendant of Dudley, Bradstreet, the Olivers, Quincys, and Jacksons, his “hut of stone” fronted on one of Boston’s most aristocratic streets, though the dear river behind it flows almost close to its little garden gate. Under his windows all the morning trooped the loveliest children of the city in the daintiest apparel, wheeled in the costliest of perambulators by the whitest-capped of French nurses. Past his door every afternoon the “swellest” turn-outs of the great city passed on their afternoon parade. Near his steps, at the hour for afternoon tea, the handsomest _coupés_ came to anchor and deposited their graceful freight. But this is not the panorama, that the Doctor himself was watching. Whether in the beautiful great dining-room, where he was first to acknowledge the sway at breakfast, luncheon and dinner, of a still gentler Autocrat than himself, or in the library upstairs, which was the heart of the home, he was always on the river side of the house. The pretty little reception-room downstairs on the Beacon Street side, he would tell you himself, with a merry smile, is a good place for your “things”; you yourself must come directly up into the library, and look on the river, broad enough just here to seem a beautiful lake. I know of no other room in the heart of a great city where one so completely forgot the nearness of the world as in this library. Even if the heavy doors stood open into the hall, one forgot the front of the house and thought only of the beautiful expanse of water that seemed to shut off all approach save from the gulls. News from the humming city must come to you, it would seem, only in sound of marriage or funeral bells in the steeples of the many towns, distinct but distant, looming across the water. And this, not because the talk by that cheerful fire was of the “Over-Soul” or the “Infinite,” so unworldly, so introspective, so wholly of things foreign or intellectual. Nothing could be more human than the chat that went on there, or the laugh that rang out so cheerily at such frequent intervals. Even with the shadow of a deep personal grief over the hearthstone, a noble cheerfulness that would not let others feel the shadow kept the room bright though the heart was heavy. Are there pictures? There is certainly one picture; for although a fine Copley hangs on one wall, and one of the