AUGUSTUS LOWELL. 643 



a leading part. Never seeking a place, his ability was such that he found 

 liimself forced into position after position of responsibility. Indomitable, 

 he was always selected to do what others agreed ought to be done but 

 were averse to doing. For Mr. Lowell knew no such thing as shirking: 

 in the discharge of duty. He disliked the disagreeable as much as any 

 one, but he was not weak. Of the financial position he held in the 

 down-town community it is enough commentary that seven bonds of 

 treasurers of great corporations were found in his tins at his death, 

 deposited with him as president. 



Such were the business concerns with which he was connected. But 

 side by side with them he gave much time and thought to matters of 

 more public interest. For many years he was a trustee of the Boston 

 Eye and Ear Infirmary. Not simply one in name, for to him and to 

 Mr. Brown its management was for a long time chiefly due. 



Ex-officio he was a trustee of the Boston Art Museum for twenty 

 years, and a trustee of the Lowell Textile School for the four years pre- 

 ceding his death. Of purely public functions he once performed one, that 

 of member of the Boston School Committee in 1857-58, and from the 

 echoes of this which have reached the writer it would seem that politics 

 played as objectionable a part in what should have been above them then 

 as now. 



Before going abroad he had had a summer place at Beverly, but attrib- 

 uting the loss of a child there to unhealthiness of the shore he sold it. 

 On coming home he cast about for a country-place where he could live 

 the year round, as being alike beneficial for his wife and his children. 

 He found it in Brookline. His children were still young, and he took to 

 repeating the experience of his own boyhood, driving them and himself 

 into town every day to school and to business respectively. Out of it, 

 beyond business hours, his life was now quite bucolic. The place he had 

 bought possessed already a fine garden and two greenhouses. Iu them 

 he centred his affections, greenhouse and garden dividing the year 

 between them. Two hot-houses of grapes helped to shield the latter, 

 which lay in a hollow open to the south. Natural embankments enclosed 

 it on the east and west, and a raised roadway, shut off from view, made 

 artificial protection on the north. Clipped evergreens stood for sentinels 

 along a terraced path, ending in an arbor which fringed one side of it, and 

 a corresponding row faced them upon the slope opposite. In this shel- 

 tered spot he spent much of his time. Pruning his shrubs, tying up his 

 plants, and attending generally to the welfare of his flowers, he was 

 almost as much of an inhabitant of the place as they. It was a world iu 



