This is enough to justify my claim for Milo Erwin’s book, but I must cite one anti-climax from the sequel touching Marshall Crain, who joined the vendetta and was later hanged for murder. “Soon after, Marsh’s wife entered his cell, and he took her on his knees and embraced her.... Her eyes glittered with a metallic gleam, and the soft curl of her lips was lost in a quiver of despair. Her’s was a deadly pallor. It was the incandescence, and not the flame of passion, that was burning in her inmost being. She would burst out into shrieks of great anguish, and then subside into sobs. She dreaded the heaving of her own bosom—dreaded the future and the world. If she could have died she would have been happy and holy in the hope of mercy. To be torn from a love made holier by past sorrows, was an insult to the attribute of Heaven. Marsh was in his sock feet, with a pair of jeans pants on, and a ragged jeans coat. He looked care-worn, and shed a few tears.” AT THE SATURDAY CLUB Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning, best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary. As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary, gradually faded, or rather gave way to the _Atlantic_ dinners; the Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September. Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes like a roof of a house.”