Some of his finest literary achievements were those which he himself had forgotten. Up to the last degree prolific, he left more than one absolutely triumphant stroke behind him in literature. The best bit of prose that I can possibly associate with him was a sketch in a newspaper bearing the somewhat meaningless title “The Last Shake,” suggested by watching the withdrawal of the last man with a hand-cart who was ever allowed to shake carpets on Boston Common. He was, no doubt, a dusty and forlorn figure enough. But to Hale’s ready imagination he stood for a whole epoch of history, for the long procession of carpet-shakers who were doing their duty there when Percy marched to Lexington, or when the cannonade from Breed’s Hill was in the air. Summer and winter had come and gone, sons had succeeded their fathers at their work, and the beating of the carpets had gone on, undrowned by the rising city’s roar. At last the more fastidious aldermen rebelled, the last shake was given, and Edward Everett Hale wrote its elegy. I suppose I kept the little newspaper cutting on my desk for five years, as a model of what wit and sympathy could extract from the humblest theme. Another stroke was of quite a different character. Out of the myriad translations of Homer, there is in all English literature but one version known to me of even a single passage which gives in a high degree the Homeric flavor. That passage is the description of the Descent of Neptune (Iliad, Book XIII), and was preserved in Hale’s handwriting by his friend Samuel Longfellow, with whom I edited the book “Thalatta,”—a collection of sea poems. His classmate, Hale, had given it to him when first written, and then had forgotten all about it. Had it not been printed by us there, it might, sooner or later, have found its way into that still unpublished magazine which Hale and I planned together, when we lived near each other in Worcester, Massachusetts,—a periodical which was to have been called the “Unfortunates’ Magazine,” and was to contain all the prose and verse sent to us by neighbors or strangers with request to get it published. I remember that we made out a title-page between us, with a table of contents, all genuine, for the imaginary first number. Such a book was to some extent made real in “Thalatta,” and the following is Hale’s brilliant Homeric translation:— THE DESCENT OF NEPTUNE There sat he high retired from the seas; There looked with pity on his Grecians beaten; There burned with rage at the God-king who slew them. Then rushed he forward from the rugged mountain; He beat the forest also as he came downward, And the high cliffs shook underneath his footsteps; Three times he trod, his fourth step reached his sea-home.