446 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 



open-air life, he was really an invalid still. If you happened to call 

 at the house when he was staying there, the chances were that he 

 would not appear. Sometimes, doubtless, he was at work. Oftener 

 I take it, he was resting, or struggling with the malady which so often 

 made even the excitement of meeting anybody the source of acute 

 suffering. It is only since one has read his autobiography, however, 

 that one can realize what his suffering was ; in real life one never 

 caught a glimpse of it. Either one did not see him at all, and inferred 

 that he was a bit indisposed ; or perhaps one found him very silent ; 

 beyond this, there was nothing to suggest that he was not as strong, 

 as well, as the best of us. Now and then, however, — generally when 

 his lameness bothered him more than usual, — he liked you to come 

 and sit with him a little while. I saw him thus alone perhaps half 

 a dozen times. 



The last time of all I remember best. It was a few weeks before 

 his seventieth birthday. I had been taking tea near by, and, hearing 

 that he was laid up for the moment, ventured over to see him while 

 I smoked my cigar. I found him quite by himself, and seemingly glad 

 of a visitor ; for,* in the growing twilight of that August evening, he 

 talked more than I ever remember to have heard him talk at once 

 before. As always, in his talk with me, he had something to say 

 about Harvard. Like any man of his time and traditions, he had more 

 doubts than a few concerning the quality of youth which is now grow- 

 ing up even in that most respectable institution of learning. Just at 

 that moment, however, he was full of interest in a new book of college 

 stories, which told most sympathetically of Harvard life as a con- 

 temporary undergraduate sees it; and to Mr. Parkman's mind — as 

 well as to mine — they had two very reassuring merits : they could 

 not possibly bore you, and they could not possibly have been written 

 by anybody but a gentleman. So our last words about Harvard were 

 cheerful ones: however languishing the finer traditions sometimes 

 seem, they show themselves there, ever and again, as freshly vital 

 as ever. 



Then, somehow, the talk turned upon the Puritans. Some little 

 time before, I had written a short life of Cotton Mather. Little as I 

 had found in Mather's faith or practice which I could literally or 

 actually share, I had found in the strength of his conservative enthu- 

 siasm something which commanded my heartiest sympathy. Now 

 what in the end I found most sympathetic in Mr. Parkman him- 

 self was the enthusiastic strength of his conservative feelings. No one 

 ever seemed to me more heartily to hate the folly of abstractions, 

 more prudently to dread the sacrifice of what we know, for all its 



