Another instance of his very highly developed sense of justice is the case of General Loring, who was supposed to be a traitor to the antislavery movement. The lesser minds raved and swore they would never speak to him again. Whittier wrote a poem about him. Emerson gave no tongue, but one evening after a Lyceum lecture in Salem he saw the general in line with those who wished to congratulate and shake hands with him. Speaking very distinctly so that everyone about could hear, he said, taking the proffered hand: “General Loring, if what I hear of you be true—I shake hands with you under protest.” The last time I saw Mr. Emerson was in 1879. I was in my twenty-seventh year, had just returned from California, and was spending some time in Concord before going abroad. Charles H. Davis, the painter, was visiting me at the Old Manse, and we both went over and supped with him. He seemed much older, but was still that example of perfect serenity I had known as a boy. His memory was beginning to fail him, which made him a bit querulous, but his daughter Ellen supplied it whenever she could. For example, he forgot that he had ever seen Tom Taylor’s tribute, or apology, to Lincoln, in _Punch_—in spite of the fact that it is included in the Parnassus—and read it to us, at my request, with astonishment and delight. He read beautifully, and his voice retained all of its old hypnotic quality. While his memory failed in the detail of names and places, he still retained, in most cases, his fascinating mode of expression, and the process of thought was still there. He said the night Davis and I were there— “Last week, it was the day ... the day that ... who was it was here? Ellen, can you remember? Oh! It was our religious friend.” He referred to Whittier. He asked, upon going out for a walk, “Where is that thing everybody borrows and no one ever returns.” He meant an umbrella and had forgotten the name. This story was told me by my mother. They knew (the women) that Emerson’s opinion of Longfellow was the same as theirs—the Bromides—and that the two men, of course, loved and admired each other—which they did not. Of course, Mr. Emerson must go to the funeral of the poet. Accordingly, the poor man was pulled up, himself more dead than alive, and brought down to Cambridge. He sat at the church, seemingly unconscious of the _raison d’être_ of it all. Then he rose (holding on to his coat tails was not effective) and joined the procession about the body. On crossing the Cambridge Common later, he suddenly stopped, faced around toward the church, and then looking at them, said: “I do not remember the name of our friend we have just buried, but he had a beautiful soul.” In some people the loss of memory can be a blessed thing.