I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes, as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation, which I will insert here. He passed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the simplest way, is it not?" he asked. "I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her. In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!" he said. "And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked. He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyeglasses, and leaned towards me hesitatingly. "And what _was_ your name?" he ventured. "Rose Hawthorne." He started, and beamed. "There!--I _thought_--but you understand how--if I had made a mistake--Could anything have been worse if you had _not_ been? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance. Some look I seemed to discover, but "---- "The complexion," I helped him by interrupting, "is entirely different." He went on: "I was--no, I cannot say I was intimate with your father, as others may have been; and yet a very delightful kind of intercourse existed between us. I did not see him often; but when I did, I had no difficulty in making him converse with me. My intercourse with your mother was also of a very gratifying nature." To this I earnestly replied respecting the admiration of my parents for him. "I delighted in suggesting a train of thought to your father," Dr. Holmes ran on, in his exquisitely cultured way, and with the _esprit_ which has surprised us all by its loveliness. "Perhaps he would not answer for some time. Sometimes it was a long while before the answer came, like an echo; but it was sure to come. It was as if the high mountain range, you know!--_The house-wall there_ would have rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; but _the mountain_!--I not long ago was visiting the Custom House at Salem, the place in which your father discovered those mysterious records that unfolded into 'The Scarlet Letter.' Ah, how suddenly and easily genius renders the spot rare and full of a great and new virtue (however ordinary and bare in reality) when _it_ has looked and dwelt! A light falls upon the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem! Oh, the purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New England! He has _done_ it, and it will never be harsh country again. How perfectly he understood Salem!" "Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded.