"He was a man who loved to stick around home, as much as any cat you ever see in your life. He used to say he'd as lief have a tooth pulled as go anywheres. Always got sick, he said, when he went away, and never sick when he didn't. Pretty nigh killed himself goin' about lecterin' two or three winters; talkin' in cold country lyceums; as he used to say, goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as a horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an edderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lecter, and another one said, 'There, now you smoke that cigar of yours after the lecter just as if you was at home,'--and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecterin' forever; but as it was, he got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecterin'." In fact, Holmes is eminently a Bostonian, and has never been really happy off his native pavements. He, however, studied medicine in Paris in his youth, and has made one or two visits to Europe since. The Atlantic Club for a long time furnished Holmes excellent company, and he in turn furnished the club with the wittiest and most sparkling talk which this country probably has known:-- "Such jests, that, drained of every joke, The very bank of language broke; Such deeds that laughter nearly died With stitches in his belted side." Among those who took part in these delightful re-unions were Emerson, Longfellow, Felton, Holmes, Agassiz, Lowell, Whipple, Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, Edmund Quincy, Francis H. Underwood, Judge Hoar, J. Elliot Cabot, and others. Lowell and Holmes were the wits _par excellence_, though Judge Hoar did not fall far behind. Emerson sat always with a seraphic smile upon his face, and Longfellow thoroughly enjoyed every good sally, though not adding to the mirth-making himself. Dr. Appleton, who met Dr. Holmes at the Saturday Club, writes:-- "Dr. Holmes was highly talkative and agreeable; he converses very much like the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,--wittily, and in a literary way, but perhaps with too great an infusion of physiological and medical metaphor. He is a little deaf, and has a mouth like the beak of a bird; indeed, he is, with his small body and quick movements, very like a bird in his general aspect." When Charles Kingsley was in Boston he met Holmes, who came in, frisked about, and talked incessantly, Kingsley intervening with a few words only occasionally. At last Holmes whisked himself away, saying, "And now I must go." "He is an insp-sp-sp-ired j-j-j-h-ack-daw," said Kingsley.