_Boyesen._ Yes; I remember him well. I doubt if I ever heard a more brilliant talker. _Howells._ No; he was one of the best talkers in America. And didn't the immortal Ralph Keeler appear upon the scene during the summer of '71 or '72? _Boyesen._ Yes; your small son "Bua" insisted upon calling him "Big Man Keeler" in spite of his small size. _Howells._ Yes, Bua was the only one who ever saw Keeler life-size. _Boyesen._ I remember how he sat in your library and told stories of his negro minstrel days and his wild adventures in many climes, and did not care whether you laughed with him or at him, but would join you from sheer sympathy, and how we all laughed in chorus until our sides ached! _Howells._ Poor Keeler! He was a sort of migratory, nomadic survival; but he had fine qualities, and was well equipped for a sort of fiction. If he had lived he might have written the great American novel. Who knows? _Boyesen._ Was not it at Cambridge that Björnstjerne Björnson visited you? _Howells._ No; that was in 1881, at Belmont, where we went in order to be in the country, and give the children the benefit of country air. When I met Björnson before, we had always talked Italian; but the first thing he said to me at Belmont, was: "Now we will speak English." And when he had got into the house, he picked up a book and said in his abrupt way: "We do not put enough in;" meaning thereby, that we ignored too much of life in our fiction--excluded it out of regard for propriety. But when I met him, some years later, in Paris, he had changed his mind about that, for he detested the French naturalism, and could find nothing to praise in Zola. _Boyesen._ I am going to ask you one of the interviewer's stock questions, but you need not answer, you know: Which of your books do you regard as the greatest? _Howells._ I have always taken the most satisfaction in "A Modern Instance." I have there come closest to American life as I know it. _Boyesen._ But in "Silas Lapham" it seems to me that you have got a still firmer grip on American reality. _Howells._ Perhaps. Still I prefer "A Modern Instance." "Silas Lapham" is the most successful novel I have published, except "A Hazard of New Fortunes," which has sold nearly twice as many copies as any of the rest. _Boyesen._ What do you attribute that to? _Howells._ Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York; the public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston. New York, as Lowell once said, is a huge pudding, and every town and village has been helped to a slice, or wants to be.