I once met at their house her cousin, Mary Leiter, afterwards Lady Curzon. They were as like as two sisters, though Jennie Pretyman was the handsomer and more gracious. The likeness went as far as the speech and even the handwriting. My mother visited us in Chicago while on one of her western lecture tours. During the greater part of the time of the World’s Fair we were in Chicago. My mother was active in the World’s Parliament of Religion and I had the pleasant task of editing a volume on the work of women at the Columbian Exposition. 1890 saw our return to Boston and to my mother’s house where I took up my old position as “boss.” Nothing was changed; each day was still too short for the task and frolic it brought. The clan constantly rallied round the old Chieftainess; children, grandchildren, relatives, “near” relatives, distinguished strangers, poor things in need of a bed, a meal, a cup of tea, a “jollying”! How did she do it? In these inhospitable post-war days it seems incredible. My diary gives glimpses of the busy hive and its queen bee. January 1st, 1890. Mama down early for breakfast. Her mail was mostly composed of bills. She threw up her hands in mock dismay. J. said, “People ought to send you _billets doux_ instead of _billets duns_!” January 14th. John Pickering Putnam proposes my name for membership in the National Club. This association grew out of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The book made a great furore. I heard Bellamy speak at Tremont Temple that winter. Edward Everett Hale, who introduced him, said, “Some time ago I wrote a book called ‘How They Lived at Hampton.’ Nobody read it. Mr. Bellamy has written a book on the same theme and everybody has read that.” January 15th. Lecture from Professor Royce on Kant. He said the modern man of the best sort to-day embodies Kant’s principles, which were that out of pure reason a man should build up for himself a system of ethics, that he should act as if there was a God, and that he should do right always because it was the manliest part to play. To a “Recollection of Tristan and Isolde”, Mr. Preston giving the music on the piano, Ralph Adams Cram reading a description of the opera. January 17th. To dine with Mrs. Louis Stackpole, where we met Dr. Holmes. He spoke of the pleasure he had in reading his own poems. “I have written one hundred,” he said, “and I like thirty.” I asked the names of his favorites. “‘The Last Leaf’,” he said. “Then perhaps ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and ‘Dorothy Q’.” He spoke of passing through the old tunnel at Salem this autumn and finding the voice of the train as wicked as ever. “It said, ‘Why don’t you _now_? Why don’t you _now_?’ in such a tempting and delightful fashion that if I had been sitting by the Cumaean Sybil I should have taken her hand in mine.”