Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward Waldo Emerson’s _The Early Years of the Saturday Club_ somewhat in the likeness of _The Education of Henry Adams_ keeps reminding one of that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell, Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty feet to the lowest branch. Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts: “I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature: “Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz, said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty, declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive