I am speaking too much, perhaps, of this latest home, occupied for so brief a time. It is not the only one in which he has ever dwelt. Howells was born in Ohio in 1837. He was the son of a country editor. He saw many hardships in those days, but there was influence enough to have him appointed consul to Venice, under Lincoln. He married, while still consul, a lady of a prominent Vermont Family. The newspapers will have it from time to time that Mrs. Howells is a great critic of and assistant in his works. I shall only say of this, that she is of an agreeable character, and an intelligence and animation that seem fully capable of it. On returning to this country he took up his residence for a while in New York, and brightened the columns of _The Nation_ with some of its earliest literary contributions. He had for some time written poems. These attracted the attention of Lowell, who was editor of _The Atlantic_. He became Mr. Field’s assistant in 1866, when the latter assumed the editorship, and in 1872 succeeded to the chief place, in which he continued till 1881, when he resigned it to be followed by Aldrich. During this time of editorship, he lived mainly at Cambridge, first in a small house he purchased on Sacramento Street, and later, for some years, in one on Concord Avenue, which he built and still owns. This latter was a pleasant, serviceable cottage, a good place to work, but with nothing particularly striking about it. It was there I first saw him, having brought him, with due fear and awe, my first novel, “Detmold.” But how little reason for awe it proved there really was! Nobody was ever more courteous, unaffected and reassuring than he. I remember we took a short walk afterwards, a part of my way homeward. He pretended, as we reached Harvard College, that it would not be safe for me to entertain any opinions differing from his own, on the mooted question of the heavy roof of the new Memorial Hall, since the fate of my manuscript was in his dictatorial hands!