In subscribing heartily to the truth of the statement, I append what I had abundant reason to know and believe. She was a firm friend to those she loved, steadfast in affection that outlasted youth and prosperity. She made life smooth for everybody within her reach whenever she could do it. She had the inestimable talent of divining what would best please each of her guests, and ministered to weakness and desire. On this night, she did not need to be told that a personal talk with the chief guest would be an event to me. She lured me adroitly into a nook adjoining the drawing-room, and as Mr. Everett, who was staying in the house, passed the door, she called him in, and presently left me on his hands for half an hour. He was always my _beau ideal_ of the perfect gentleman. He talked quietly, in refined modulations and chaste English that betokened the scholar. Like all really great men, he bore himself with modest dignity, with never a touch of bluster or self-consciousness. In five minutes I found myself listening and replying, as to an old acquaintance. His voice was low, and so musical as to fasten upon him the sobriquet of the “silver-tongued orator.” I could repeat, almost verbatim, his part of our talk on that occasion. I give the substance of one section that impressed me particularly. We spoke of _Hiawatha_, then a recent publication. Mr. Everett thought that Longfellow transgressed artistic rules, and was disobedient to literary precedent in translating Indian names in the text of the poem. The repetition of “Minnehaha—Laughing Water,” “The West Wind—Mudjekeewis,” “Ishkooda—the Comet,” etcetera, was affected and tedious. “Moreover,” he continued, smiling, “I have serious doubts respecting the florid metaphors and highly figurative speech which Cooper and other writers of North American Indian stories have put into the mouths of their dusky heroes.” He went on to say that, when Governor of Massachusetts, he received a deputation of aborigines from the Far West. In anticipation of the visit, he primed himself with an ornate address of welcome, couched in the figurative language he imagined would be familiar and agreeable to the chiefs. This was delivered through an interpreter, and received in blank silence. Then the principal sachem replied in curt platitudes, with never a trope or allegorical allusion. Mr. Everett added that he had learned since that the vocabulary of the modern Indian is meagre and prosaic in the extreme. The justice of the observation was borne in upon me when I sat in James Redpath’s box at the Indian Exhibition I have spoken of in another chapter, and heard snatches of alleged oratory as transmitted by a fluent interpreter to the Newark audience. Anything more tame and bare it would be hard to imagine. XXX A MUSICAL CONVENTION—GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT—WHEN “THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG—THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS—BETROTHAL—DEMPSTER IN HIS OLD AGE