My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent. The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast; his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded for me. My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my husband: “You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before you ever saw her. And such _good_ friends as we have been for—bless my soul!—can it be more than fifty years?” Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have known one such man, and to have had him for my “_good_ friend” for “more than fifty years.” XXVIII MY FIRST OPERA—“PETER PARLEY”—RACHEL AS “CAMILLE”—BAYARD TAYLOR—T. B. ALDRICH—G. P. MORRIS—MARIA CUMMINS—MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY THE three weeks passed in New York on my way home were thronged with novel and enchanting “sensations.” I saw my first opera—_Masaniello_, and it was the début of Elise Henssler. The party of which I was a member included Caroline Cheeseboro, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich—“Peter Parley.” To my intense satisfaction, my seat was beside the kindly old gentleman. Was not _Parley’s Magazine_ the first periodical I had ever read? And had not I devoured every book he had written, down to a set of popular biographies for which my father had subscribed as a gift to me on my eighteenth birthday? That I should, really and truly, be sitting at his side and hearing him speak, was a treat I could hardly wait until to-morrow to dilate upon in my home-diary letter. He was social and amusing, and, withal, intelligently appreciative of the music and actors. He rattled away jovially in the _entr’actes_ of other operas and personal traits of stage celebrities, theatrical, and operatic. He told me, too, of how he had been ridiculed for embarking upon a career his friends thought puerile and contemptible, when he issued the initial number of _Parley’s Magazine_. If I was secretly disappointed that his affection for his juvenile constituency was more perfunctory than I had supposed from his writings, I smothered the feeling as disloyal, and would be nothing short of charmed.