beautiful girl who suggested to him the character or personal appearance of Ethel Newcomb, at least such was the gossip.
I remember going with her to one of his lectures and seeing Thackeray in the greenroom before he entered. It was here he showed the playful and engaging side of his manner. Thackeray was a gentleman born and bred, and his polish of manner never left him, even when his fun would have made him boyish.
Sallie Baxter was a dark beauty of the Spanish type, most exquisitely lovely, with fabulous great black eyes, whose lashes swept her eyebrows. She was a natural, unaffected person, and during his stay in New York Thackeray was frequently a guest in her mother's house. Miss Baxter seemed to treat him like a daughter. Perhaps she brought back those dear ones whom he had left at 13 Young Street, South Kensington. Many suppers and dinners and theatre parties brought me to see the great man rather intimately, and I do not remember a more easy-going and genial person. His tall, commanding form and gray head, his nez retroussé and his eye-glasses, his firm tread and charming laugh, got to be as well known in Kew York as they were in London. His little notes in his very neat handwriting found their way into our albums. He was always accessible and full of enjoyment, and yet when we saw him sailing along majestically down Broadway, with his hands in his pockets, there was an air of melancholy and of preoccupation in his expressive face. But he was "as reticent as he was brave," and no one heard him speak of his sorrows, if he had any. Perhaps this was one of the happiest periods of his life. Sallie Baxter married at the South, was separated from her Northern family by the terrors of the civil war, and died young,
