The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in Cambridge or Boston;[129] he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung chiefly out of the establishment of the _Atlantic_. For a short time, apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner, under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong interest,--dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given by Mr. Phillips at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of literary men naturally connected with the _Atlantic_, and of congenial spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with the _Atlantic Monthly_ people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21 December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club, at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same way a constant succession of figures without really seeing them. They come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any relation to the preoccupying thought.