"'No,' said I, 'when I go to Westminster you shall pay for me. When you are in Boston, I shall pay for you.' "When we got out of the carriage the hackman took off his hat and said: 'If the carriage were mine, you shouldn't pay a cent. Doctor Stanley is a good and great man, and I am proud to have carried him.' That's pretty good for a Boston hackman." As my eyes roamed over the mass of portfolios stacked in an orderly manner in the case at the foot of his lounge, my imagination conjured many an interview that Mr. Hale must have had with immortals, contemporaries, and friends of the man before me. And what invaluable letters must those portfolios contain! Doctor Hale evidently caught my curiosity and my glance. "You would like to see some autographs?" he generously asked. "Yes, indeed, but I am afraid there is not time now. Tell me about some of your most interesting ones." Then it proved that Doctor Hale had advantages in the line of presidential autographs, because of his eminent and political ancestry. His collection in this respect is complete, and in this way, he says, he began it. "I was sitting one evening tearing up old papers, after my father's death, and among them noticed a letter on the character of Washington. Not considering it worth keeping, I took it to tear it up, when out dropped a yellow paper, ancient and faded. It proved to be a letter of George Washington himself, which had been enclosed in the other letter by my father, evidently to illustrate a point in character which the writer had raised. Then and there I resolved to make a collection of presidential autographs. I don't dare to tell you how many family commissions I hold in my portfolio. To me the collection is almost the history of my family. I have been tempted to publish a couple of volumes of national history of the nineteenth century, to be taken bodily from my own portfolio of autographs. It might be rather interesting." "Changing the subject, when did you first meet Emerson?" "Let me see, I first heard Emerson when I was eleven years old. He was delivering his lecture on Mohammed. I first spoke to him in Harvard College chapel, when a mutual acquaintance had just taken the highest honors. Emerson said of him, with his keenest look: "'I didn't know he was so fine a fellow. Now, if some misfortune could only happen to him; if he could be turned out of college, or could be unpopular in his class, or his father could fail in business, all would be well with him.' "This seemed at the time cynical, but when I read of the hardships of Emerson's early life, and heard of the unhappy end of the man of college honors, I understood it and was astounded at his penetration.