Mr. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was in Boston at this time, and in a personal conference the preliminary arrangement appears to have been made. Mr. Hayes also came to Boston in June, and Lowell met him and his wife, and has left a record of the impression they produced upon him, in one of his letters written shortly afterward.[68] The anticipation of this new chapter in his life seems to have given him a divided feeling. The honor of the place half amused and half pleased him. With the ingenuous pride of a college man, he thought how his name would look in capitals in the college triennial, and wished his father, who had a high sense of that dignity, could have enjoyed the sight. He was too fixed in his position before the world to be over-elated at the conspicuousness which the place brought him, and he disliked publicity so much that that side of the business filled him with a sort of dismay. He welcomed the opportunity for enlarging his Spanish studies, and he had an honest desire to represent his country well. “I believe,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Hughes, “that I can live my own life (part of the time, at least) in Madrid, and need not have any more flummery than I choose. What unsettled me first was that a good many people wished to see me sent to London, and I was persuaded that I might be of some service there by not living like a Duke, and in promoting a better understanding between the two countries. But my friends were mistaken in supposing that I had been thought of for England.... Things are going more to my mind now, and President Hayes made a most agreeable impression on me when he was here the other day. He struck me as simple, honest, and full of good feeling, a very good American to my thinking.... By all means come to Madrid. I shall have a house there, and a spare bed in it always. It would be delightful to take you a drive to the Prado in my own (hired) ambassadorial coach. My ‘Excellency’ will give me cause for much serious meditation.” It must not be supposed, however, that the prospect was untouched with doubt. “I am by no means sure,” Lowell writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson of Baltimore, shortly after accepting the post, “that I did wisely in accepting the Spanish mission. I really did not wish to go abroad at all, but my friends have been urgent (Godkin among them), and I go.”