It was a mark of our highest consideration and esteem to produce Riley at entertainments given in honor of distinguished visitors, but this was never effected without considerable plotting. (I have heard that in Atlanta “Uncle Remus” was even a greater problem to his fellow citizens!) Riley’s innate modesty, always to be reckoned with, was likely to smother his companionableness in the presence of ultra-literary personages. His respect for scholarship, for literary sophistication, made him reluctant to meet those who, he imagined, breathed a divine ether to which he was unacclimated. At a small dinner in honor of Henry James he maintained a strict silence until one of the other guests, in an effort to “draw out” the novelist, spoke of Thomas Hardy and the felicity of his titles, mentioning _Under the Greenwood Tree_ and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_. Riley, for the first time addressing the table, remarked quietly of the second of these, “It’s an odd thing about eyes, that they usually come in sets!”--a comment which did not, as I remember, strike Mr. James as being funny. Riley always seemed a little bewildered by his success, and it was far from his nature to trade upon it. He was at pains to escape from any company where he found himself the centre of attraction. He resented being “shown off” (to use his own phrase) like “a white mouse with pink eyes.” He cited as proof that he was never intended for a social career the unhappy frustration of his attempt to escort his first sweetheart to a party. Dressed with the greatest care, he knocked at the beloved’s door. Her father eyed him critically and demanded: “What you want, Jimmy?” “Come to take Bessie to the party.” “Humph! Bessie ain’t goin’ to no party; Bessie’s got the measles!” V In so far as Riley was a critic of life and conduct, humor was his readiest means of expression. Whimsical turns of speech colored his familiar talk, and he could so utter a single word--always with quiet inadvertence--as to create a roar of laughter. Apart from the commoner type of anecdotal humor, he was most amusing in his pursuit of fancies of the Stocktonesque order. I imagine that he and John Holmes of Old Cambridge would have understood each other perfectly; all the Holmes stories I ever heard--particularly the one about Methuselah and the shoe-laces, preserved by Colonel Higginson--are very similar to yarns invented by Riley.