The actual facts of the appointment of Lowell to the Spanish mission have been so explicitly told by Mr. Howells, who had a grateful part to play in the transaction, that with his permission I copy his account of it. “I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time in carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he gave a quick ‘Ah!’ and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee, we turned into his study, without further allusion to the matter. “A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him and make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go he said, with a sigh of vague reluctance, ‘I _should_ like to see a play of Calderon,’ as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could still be fulfilled. ‘Upon this hint I acted,’ and in due time it was found in Washington that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.”[66] In a letter to his daughter[67] Lowell says further that he had also the choice of going to Berlin.