Sala, Thackeray, and George P. Marsh; Mr. W. W. Story, home from Rome, and General di Cesnola, fresh from Cyprus. This was a salon indeed! Everything that was fresh and new. Paul du Chaillu, from Africa and the land of the gorilla, and Charles Kingsley, with his gifted daughter Rose. From time to time a fresh arrival — N. P. Willis, General Morris, or Lewis Gaylord Clark — while in one corner would sit the authoress of Queechy and the poetesses Alice and Phœbe Cary, and Bryant, Bancroft, Everett, and Emerson. Then to know Mr. Bancroft and to have had the entree to his always hospitable house was like going behind the scenes with the stage-manager after having been taken to the play. He knew everything and everybody; had a most exhaustive habit of reading, and sometimes asked me to come and hear the last chapter of his History as he read the MS. to his wife and a few friends. He sent me books such as then only seemed to come to a great scholar. At Newport his knowledge would overflow in the most delightful manner, as, in talking of the old mill, he would tell us how he had waded through a swamp near Taunton River to read a runic inscription supposed to have been left by the Danes, which he thought would throw light on it. He waded his way through water, forced his way through scrub, and was often impeded by a lack of foothold, but still never lost his grip on the subject; and he was honest enough to say that he had gained no light on the subject of the origin of the old mill. He concluded that it is simply a windmill, built by an early settler of Newport.
Mr. Bancroft, unlike Varnhagen von Ense, whom he was fond of quoting, never lost his pleasure in society. He said that every ten years a man should move nearer the sun. He moved from Boston to New York, from
