FRANCIS PARKMAN. 445 



later, Mr. Parkman discovered that the exceptional stalwartness of 

 this fisherman's honesty was at least partly due to- the fact that the 

 man had mistaken him for an official inspector of the local fisheries. 



When one met Mr. Parkman thus taking his ease, one grew aware 

 of a certain boyish freshness of feeling and nature in him. If he 

 caught sight of you on the shore, or in a passing boat, he would wave 

 his hand with a jolly sort of greeting, or perhaps, if you were near 

 enough, would shout a friendly word or two. As I have said before, 

 too, the vigor with which he would send his boat through the water, 

 paying scant respect to the swift tidal currents of the Piscataqua, won 

 the instant, lasting admiration of athletic boys. You felt instinctively 

 that the man was enjoying this simple open-air pleasure as keenly as 

 if he were a child of ten ; that the mere fun of pulling himself about 

 the rockbound little harbor, and of playing with the far from sportive 

 fish still to be caught there, was enough to make the days when he 

 could do it worth living. 



Or perhaps you would yourself be rowing past the old Wentworth 

 place, and would find him sitting on the pier, with the lilacs, and the 

 great chimneys with their wilderness of rambling roof, behind him. 

 You would stop to pass the time of day, as the saying is, to talk for a 

 few minutes of whatever might turn up. As likely as not, the subject 

 would be the last new novel or story that was really amusing. For 

 Mr. Parkman liked to be amused, and found few things more amusing 

 than a good, rattling story read aloud to him. Here, without any 

 affectation of literary doctrine, his taste was romantic. If I remember 

 rightly, he had small patience with that considerable body of modern 

 fiction which gravely claims the right to bore you. If he had ever 

 seemed self-conscious enough to warrant such a surmise, you might 

 sometimes have ventured to wonder whether the consciousness that, as 

 a serious historian, he had never presumed to bore anybody, might 

 not have whetted his indignation at solemn scribblers of pretentious 

 make-believe. Such an idea, though, could never have occurred to 

 you in his presence. The normal impersonality, the animated ob- 

 jectivity of his talk, the frank, idiomatic raciness of his phrase, the 

 wholesomeness of his nature, made you forget that he had ever written 

 anything. You thought of him, by and by, just as a remarkably 

 friendly human being. You forgot even that he was not exactly of 

 an age with you. Like his own literary style, which kept pace so 

 sensitively with the best literary feeling of his day, the man himself 

 was steadily contemporary. 



There were times, too, far fewer than one would wish, when one 

 saw him even more intimately. In the midst of all this vigorous 



