One of the most devoted followers of this new school of natural history, and himself a naturalist of distinction, was Dr. Alexander H. Japp, who, under the pen-name of “H. A. Page,” wrote the first account of Thoreau published in this country. I have a recollection of many pleasant chats with him, especially of a visit which he paid me with Mr. Walton Ricketson, the sculptor, a son of that intimate friend of Thoreau’s of whom I have spoken. Walton Ricketson was a boy at the time when Thoreau used to visit his father at New Bedford; but he was present on the occasion when the grave hermit of Walden surprised the company by a sudden hilarious impulse, which prompted him to sing “Tom Bowling” and to perform an improvised dance, in which, it is said, he kept time to the music but executed some steps more like those of the Indians than the usual ballroom figures. Dr. Japp was also a biographer of De Quincey, and by his sympathetic understanding did much to correct the disparaging judgments passed on “the English opium-eater” by many critics and press-writers. As a result of a study of De Quincey which I published in 1904, I made the acquaintance, three years later, of Miss Emily de Quincey (she spelt her name in that manner), his last surviving daughter. She was a most charming old lady, full of vivacity and humour; and her letters, of which I received a good many, were written with a sprightliness recalling that of her father in his lighter moods; some of her reminiscences, too, were very interesting. She remembered the opium decanter and glass standing on the mantelpiece when she was a child, but she said that De Quincey quite left off the use of the drug for years before his death. She told me that the grudge against her father, which frequently found expression in “grotesque descriptions” of him, was caused in part by his neglect to answer the letters, many of a very flattering kind, addressed to him by readers of his books; a remissness which was due, not to any lack of courtesy or gratitude, but to his inveterate procrastination; he would always be going to write “to-morrow” or “when he had a good pen.” On one occasion an admirer wrote to him from Australia, begging him for “some truths” that he might give to his little son (who had been named after De Quincey) when he should be able to understand them. De Quincey said sadly to his daughter: “My dear, truths are very low with me just now. Do you think, if I sent a couple of lies, they would answer the purpose?” She feared that he never sent either truths or lies. Among the unanswered letters which her father received she recollected that there was one from “three brothers,” accompanied by a volume of poems by “Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.” It was by the poetry of Ellis that the De Quinceys were most struck, but not till years afterwards did they guess that those “brothers” were the Brontë sisters in disguise.