“I am in the same lodgings as last year, which is a pleasure to me, with kind, simple people, who do all they can to make me happy. They are very like our New England country folk, except in accent, almost the same thing in fact.” In this letter Lowell intimates one of the physical ills that were attacking him, the loss of sleep. One of his friends and admirers, Canon Stubbs, gave this reminiscence,[105] not long after Lowell’s death. “Some years ago,” he writes, “I was in the habit of meeting him from time to time at the country house of a common friend. One especial evening--a ‘golden night of memory’--I shall never forget. After dinner one of the guests asked Lowell to read one of his own poems. This request he playfully put aside, but he began to talk to us about Wordsworth, and read to us part of the ‘Laodamia,’ commenting, as he read, much I confess to my surprise, on the narrowness and limited experience of Wordsworth, and the one-sided development of his intellectual powers. Then some chance expression turned the current of his talk, and he began describing, with all the quaint humor and delightful raillery of which he was so complete a master, a special antidote to sleeplessness which he said he had himself lately devised,--the invention of new chapters in Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. I wish I could remember the chapter which he then recited. The aptness of the Latin phraseology was irresistibly funny. It told ‘how Vercingetorix and his army, retreating before Cæsar, had taken refuge on a high, rocky hill, strongly fortified and precipitous on every side, from which at first Cæsar had despaired of dislodging him without a long siege. But while Cæsar was considering these things an opportunity of acting successfully seemed to offer. He noticed a fissure in the rock, which on investigation by night was discovered to pierce the hill from side to side. [Here we expected the anachronism of dynamite or gunpowder. But no; Lowell more justly appreciated the natural genius of Cæsar.] Knowing that the winter was now nigh at hand, Cæsar ordered two legions of soldiers to block up with clay and twisted willow work the opposite ends of the rocky cleft, and then, having filled the chasm with water, to await the issue. That night the frost came; the water expanded; the high rock was cleft asunder; and down came Vercingetorix and his army. For this success’--Lowell concluded--‘a supplication of twenty days was decreed by the Senate upon receiving Cæsar’s letter.’”