I remember a dinner she allowed me to arrange for Crawford, who was anxious to meet the literary lights. The company included Mr. Longfellow, Doctor Holmes, and Mr. Tom Appleton. We lingered at table, listening to Marion’s vivid stories of Indian life. He was a born romancer; if he had lived in the East he would have become a professional story-teller and sat in the market place telling tales. Nothing he ever wrote compared with his brilliant talk; friends of Robert Louis Stevenson have told me the same thing of him. Crawford had made quaint archaic dinner cards, with a verse for each guest. My mother’s card had an absurd drawing of an owl and some lines to Minerva. The evening went off well, but the next day my mother gave me this advice: “Do not again invite Doctor Holmes and Mr. Appleton together. It is like asking two prima donnas to sing at the same entertainment!” Though my aunt was overjoyed at having her boy with her again, she was very anxious about his future and disappointed that his work in India had not carried him a stage farther on the road to fortune. “My brilliant boy will do nothing with all his gifts,” she said to me. “He is a rolling stone.” “He will make a name for himself and a fortune for you!” I told her more than once. I never felt any doubt about his success; in those days he looked and moved like a conquering hero. I have forgotten, if I ever knew, why Crawford gave up India for America. My mother introduced Crawford to all the editors she knew, and very soon he was hard at work writing book notices for the _Critic_ and articles for all the magazines that would give him a chance. Meanwhile he was studying with Georg Henschel for the operatic stage. He had a fine voice and a magnificent stage presence, but his ear was not quite true. He would sing perfectly in tune four nights running; on the fifth he would sing false and never know it. Henschel at first thought that this defective ear could be overcome by training. The old music my uncle and my brother had sung was brought out, and every evening my mother and Marion gave us delightful concerts. Crawford went that spring to visit Uncle Sam in New York and there he got the clew to his real calling. He talked a great deal to my uncle about his experience in India and about one man in especial, who had deeply interested him. Uncle Sam said: “You must write a novel about that man.”