"Your own home life and work, the honest questions of little Richard and Ian waken me from a long sleep, I believe, and set me thinking. What is a man remembered by the longest? Brain work, memorial building, or heart touching? Do you recollect once meeting old Moore--Clement Clark Moore--at my father's? He was a profound scholar in Greek and Hebrew lexicology, and gave what was once his country house and garden in old Chelsea Village to the theological seminary of his professorship. How many people remember this, or his scholarship? But before that old rooftree was laid low, he wrote beneath it, quite offhand, a little poem, 'The Night Before Christmas,' that blends with childhood's dreams anew each Christmas Eve--a few short verses holding more vitality than all his learning. "If my book ever takes body, my friend, it will be under your roof, where you and yours can vitalize it. This is no fishing for invitations--we know each other too frankly well for that. What I wish to do is to come into your neighbourhood next springtime, without encroaching on your hospitality, and work some hours every day in the library, or that corner of her charmed attic that Barbara has shared with me. It is bewitching. Upon my word, I do not wonder that she sees the world rose-colour as she looks upon it from that window. I, too, had long reveries there, in which experience and tradition mixed themselves so cleverly that for the time I could not tell whether it was my father or myself who had sometimes proudly escorted the lovely Carroll sisters upon their afternoon promenade down Broadway, from Prince Street to the Bowling Green, each leading her pet greyhound by a ribbon leash, or which of us it was that, in seeking to recapture an escaping hound, was upset by it in the mud, to the audible delight of some rivals in a 'bus and his own discomfiture, being rendered thereby unseemly for the beauty's further company." * * * * * "January 20, 19--. "Thank you, dear Richard, for your brotherly letter. I make no protestations, for I know your invitation would not be given if you felt my presence would in any way be a drawback or impose care on any member of your household, and the four little hearts that Barbara drew, with her own, Evan's, and the boys' initials in them, are seals upon the invitation. "Do not deplore, however, the lack of nearness of my haunts in Astor and Lenox libraries. Times are changed, and the new order condemns me to sit here if I read, there if I take out pencil and pad to copy--the red tape distracts me. The old Historical Society alone remains in comfortable confusion, and that is soon to move upward half a day's walk. "But, as it chances, you have collected many of the volumes that are necessary to me, and I will use them freely, for some day, friend of mine, my books will be joined to yours, and also feel the touch of little Richard's and Ian's fingers, and of their sons, also, I hope.