I gave up my studio in New York and went to Boston, and, my commissions executed, moved from there to Cambridge, where I made my home, returning thenceforward to the Adirondacks in the late summer and autumn of every year while I remained in America. The following springtime I spent making studies in that classic neighborhood, especially in a favorite haunt of Lowell's,--the "Waverley Oaks,"--a curious group of large white oaks, which had taken root some hundreds of years ago on the foot of a moraine of one of the offsets of the great glacier which, countless thousands of years ago, had covered New England. They were beautiful trees and greatly beloved by Lowell, for whom I painted the principal group, with Beaver Brook, another of his favorite studies, and he lying by its bank in the foreground, a little full-length portrait, not the length of my finger. I painted also a similar portrait of Longfellow, under the most beautiful of the oaks, on an eight-by-ten-inch canvas. It was a good portrait, but Lowell deterred me from finishing it as I wished, saying that if I touched it again I should destroy the likeness. I am half inclined to think that his insistence was mainly intended to abbreviate the martyrdom of Longfellow, whom I conducted every day to the Oaks, to insure pre-Raphaelite fidelity, making him sit on a huge boulder under the tree and even forgetting to carry a cushion for him, so that he sat on the bare stone until at last the discomfort was evident to me, when I folded my coat to cushion his stone seat. So kindly was his nature that he had submitted to the inconvenience with the docility and delicacy of a child, without a sign of impatience.