442 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 



ning of the time when to me he changed from a personage to a 

 personality is that, at certain intervals, I began to meet him here and 

 there ; that his strongly featured, smooth-shaven, thin face looked as 

 if made for an expression of severity ; and that there was always about 

 his eyes and his mouth an expression of alert, kindly interest in what- 

 ever was doing, which did away with the notion of severity altogether. 

 Remarkably self-contained, you felt him after a while ; but, to a still 

 more remarkable degree, not a bit self-centred. For all his firmness 

 of aspect, and all the reputation by which this firmness was more than 

 justified, you found yourself insensibly growing to think of him chiefly 

 as a keenly interested observer. Alert, observing, kindly he looked, 

 whether in a private house, or in the full dignity of the Commence- 

 ment stage at Harvard, where he would sit with the other Fellows of 

 the Corporation behind that impressive rail on the stage of Sanders 

 Theatre, which in any less dissenting atmosphere would so inevitably 

 remind one of an altar. Perhaps the most vivid memory I have of 

 him in those days is of how he sat one Class Day evening in a 

 doorway of Holworthy Hall. He had come to Class Day with one 

 of his daughters ; he did not wish to hurry her home. Very likely, 

 he was pretty well tired out; but he did not look so. He sat there, 

 in the dim light of the lanterns, listening to the singing of the Glee 

 Club, leaning forward a little, resting one hand on his cane, talking 

 very little, but just watching, with his kindly, half-amused look, the 

 swarms of young people who were passing. Somehow the memory 

 of his figure has clung ever since to that doorway of Holworthy. It 

 was not a bit the figure of a grave, heroic historian ; it was just that 

 of a quiet, kindly New England gentleman. 



Several years later I first chanced on the historian that was in him. 

 Meanwhile I had grown to know him better, meeting him always 

 with the pleasure that comes to one from a cordially friendly greeting, 

 but never getting further. In the early autumn of 1880 he was 

 abroad, collecting material, I believe, for his last books. One day I 

 happened to meet him in the Luxembourg Gallery ; and by mere 

 chance to stop with him before Delaroche's familiar picture of the 

 death of the Due de Guise. My notion of the historical circumstance 

 therein portrayed was deplorably vague. I happened to say so. 

 Thereupon Mr. Parkman began to tell the story with the vividness 

 so familiar in his writings. All the essential details of time and place 

 were at his tongue's end, — picturesque little touches, too, of what this 

 personage and that said or wrote. It was such a bit of story-telling as 

 now and then you hear from an eyewitness, — just as vividly real as 



