The Radical Club, which met on the first Monday of every month, was one of the chief gathering places of the Owls. I remember my mother’s interest in these meetings, and little bits of her talk about them: “To-day Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion. He told this anecdote: ‘Somebody said to the Reverend Dr. Payson of Portland, “How much you must enjoy religion, since you live always administering it,” he replied that nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as nobody enjoyed food less than cooks.’” William Rounseville Alger, prince of Owls, was tolerated by me as the father of my dear friend, Kitty Alger, a handsome girl, with fine black hair which she wore “down her back” in three thick braids. She was like her mother, gentle and domestic. The elder daughter, Abbie, was more like her father. She was intelligent, with a gift for languages, which she put to good account in translating foreign books for the Boston publishers. Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they do their contemporaries. It was only in later years that I gained a sense of the incongruity of the union between Mr. and Mrs. Alger. They had a large family, and their marriage was, I believe, a happy one in spite of--perhaps on account of--the strong contrasts of tastes and character. Mr. Alger was a pedantic Unitarian clergyman, and a student of metaphysics. He never, if he could avoid it, used a word of less than five syllables. I remember him at his own house, silent and abstracted; when he was at our house, consorting with other Owls, his language was splendid and free, if a thought paradoxical. A favorite word of his was ratiocination, which Mother once caricatured, exclaiming: “Ours is indeed a ratty ’orssy nation!” I was once at the Algers’ when a company of the elect gathered to hear him read from his latest work, “The Poetry of the Orient.” A few of us juveniles sat on the stairs, waiting till the reading should be over and the vanilla ice cream and escalloped oysters appear. Among the grown-up guests were the brilliant Choate sisters, Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Pratt, cousins of Mrs. Alger’s. In discussing the reading with Mama, Mrs. Pratt exclaimed: “Brother Alger has his _limités_ and his _extensés_!” A phrase my mother quoted all her life. I learned one lesson from “Brother Alger” that I never forgot. I was dining with them one Sunday and, as Mr. Alger plunged the carving fork into the breast of a prodigious turkey, he asked me what part of the bird I preferred. Meaning to be polite, I said I had no choice. “Then you shall have the drumstick,” was the carver’s answer.