Beautiful as Newport is in these soft days of early summer, it is even lovelier in the autumn, and every year it is harder to leave Oak Glen, to give up the wide arc of the heavens, and to look up into God’s sky, between the two lines of brick houses of a city street. Each winter the place at Newport is kept open a little longer, and it is only the closing days of November that find Mrs. Howe established in her house in Boston. Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her Boston home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim every hour in the day. Her remarkable powers of endurance, her splendid enjoyment of life and health make her winters as full of pleasure as the more peaceful summer-tide. It is a very different life from that led at Oak Glen; it has an endless variety of interests, social, private, public, charitable, philanthropic, musical, artistic, and intellectual. A half-dozen clubs and associations of women in the city and its near vicinity, which owe their existence in large part to Mrs. Howe’s efforts, claim her presence in their midst at least once in every year. Among the public occasions which have held the greatest interest for Mrs. Howe of late years was the dedication of the new Kindergarten for the Blind in 1887, at which she read one of her happiest “occasional poems.” The authors’ reading in aid of the Longfellow memorial fund, at the Boston Museum, where, before an audience the like of which had never before been seen in the theatre, she read a poem in memory of Longfellow, was an occasion which will not soon be forgotten by those who were present. Mrs. Howe was the only woman who took part in the proceedings, the other authors who read from their own works being Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Mark Twain, Colonel Higginson, Prof. Norton, Mr. E. E. Hale, Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Howells. Mrs. Howe has spoken several times at the Nineteenth Century Club, and she is always glad to revisit New York, for though she is often thought to be a Bostonian, she never forgets that the first twenty years of her life were passed in New York, the city of her birth. MAUD HOWE. [Illustration] MR. HOWELLS MR. HOWELLS IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON