Arlo Bates, in acknowledging a gift copy of "Lazy Tours" wrote: "I thank you for 'Lazy Tours.' It is done with a touch not only light and delicate, but strangely gentle. It is written with the experience of a woman and the enthusiasm of a girl." In another note of Mr. Bates', belonging to this time, are the remarks: "Friendship is about the only real thing in humanity." "The few of us who, in this muse-forgotten age, still care for real poetry, are to be congratulated no less." The sculptor Greenough wrote: "Verily, your 'Lazy Tours' are a rebuke to industry, for it has woven a magic carpet, as that of the 'Arabian Nights,' only you transport the reader, in every sense of the word.... What excellent prose you poets write when you try." The critics were all agreed, and the verdict of the public endorsed that of Mrs. Moulton's friends and of the reviewers. The book had precisely that lightness of touch which is perennially charming, and which perhaps is due equally to literary expertness and to innate good taste. The usual summer abroad, full of social experiences, followed; and then the winter in Boston with the crowded Friday receptions. A letter which belongs to this winter is full of a lightness and kindliness characteristic of the writer. _James Whitcomb Riley to Mrs. Moulton_ "... You, after months and months of barbarous silence, are asking me why I have not written! Well, I'll answer in my artlessness and most truthfully tell you that my last letter (and a really appealing one) meeting with no response whatever, I just had concluded that I'd win highest favor in your estimate by not writing. So I quit writing, and went to pouting,--this latter so persistently indulged in that my previously benignant features now look as though they were being cast back on my very teeth, so to speak, by a tawdry, wavery, crinkly looking-glass in the last gasp of a boarding-house. But since your voice of yesterday, the eyes of me are lit again, and the whole face beams like radiant summer time. No wonder you continue in indifferent health. It's a judgment on you for your neglect of me. Now you'll begin to improve. And you can get into perfect health by strictly maintaining this rigorous course of writing to me. Heroic treatment, of a truth!..." One of the entries in the diary of the winter reads: "Could hardly get to the Browning Society, where I read 'A Toccata of Galuppi's.' Mr. Moulton seemed interested about the reading, and I read him the 'Toccata' after dinner, and other poems. A beautiful evening." [Illustration: WILLIAM U. MOULTON _Page 215_]