“These to the printer,” I exclaimed, And, in my humorous way, I added (as a trifling jest), “There’ll be the devil to pay.” He took the paper, and I watched, And saw him peep within; At the first line he read, his face Was all upon the grin. He read the next, the grin grew broad, And shot from ear to ear; He read the third, a chuckling noise I now began to hear. The fourth, he broke into a roar; The fifth, his waistband split; The sixth, he burst five buttons off, And tumbled in a fit. Ten days and nights, with sleepless eye, I watched that wretched man; And since, I never dare to write As funny as I can. CHAPTER II THE BIRTH OF OLIVER HOLMES “In the last week of August used to fall Commencement day at Cambridge,” remarks the doctor. “I remember that week well, for something happened to me once at that time, namely, I was born.” It was in the year 1809—the same year that Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, and Lincoln were born—and on August 29. There is still in existence an old and yellow almanac that belonged once to Dr. Abiel Holmes, Oliver’s father. On the page given to August the numbers of the days run down the left-hand side, 1, 2, 3, down to 28, 29, 30, 31. Opposite 29 are two little parallel lines, used as a star or mark of reference, and at the bottom of the page the two little lines are repeated, and after them is written in ink “_son b_.” Of course “_b_” stands for “born.” A few grains of black sand were scattered over the wet ink to prevent it from blotting, and some of those grains of sand may be seen glistening there to this day. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born, and the fact of his birth was thus recorded in the almanac—“_son b_.” Samuel Johnson was born in 1709; or, as Holmes expresses it, “the year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English history by his birth.” It appeared to strike Holmes as a huge joke that he had been born just one hundred years after Dr. Johnson, and he amused himself by following out the parallel of their lives. Every year he used to take down his copy of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” to see what the big, wise old grumbler was doing in that year, just a hundred years before. At last, in the year 1884, when he came to the end of Johnson’s life, he said that he felt that the incubus was raised; he had outlived the ponderous parallel. The birth of the “laughing philosopher,” as Holmes has been called, took place in a very old house in Cambridge, close to Harvard College, and made famous in his poems as “the old gambrel-roofed house.” After the battle of Lexington, General-in-chief Artemas Ward had made this house the headquarters for the rallying of the patriots, and General Warren had stopped there on his way to Bunker Hill. George Washington and other famous men in those days must often have darkened its doors.