200 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



a famous boys' school in Boston, whence for many years came 

 to Harvard a train of youths who had been well placed in the 

 way of scholarship and imbued with the manly simplicity of his 

 admirable nature. Like others who live with youth, Mr. Dix- 

 well to the end of his life kept a large share of it in his soul. He 

 and his agreeable household gave me refuge in the time when I 

 found myself a stranger in a strange land ; for at the outset New 

 England was very foreign to me, and this though I could not 

 discern in what the difference consisted. It was nowhere in the 

 essentials, for at the firesides and the tables of those who were 

 so good as to make me welcome I found always my own people, 

 so like that I puzzled my wits to see what was the matter, and 

 I hardly know to this day more of it than I did then; yet there 

 is the intangible something that does not did not then and 

 even now does not fit me, as does the social envelope I have 

 found in England. I am inclined to think it is a secondary 

 effect of Puritanism, which offsets the method of contact of man 

 with man. Some slight, but yet important peculiarity in the 

 way people look at or greet you or pass you on the street with 

 no sense of your existence matters of no weight, save for the 

 fact that primitive-minded folk are as blindly sensitive as are 

 dogs and other animals to the manners of folk about them. I 

 am the more inclined thus to explain my salient, silly sense of 

 isolation in the old days, and the remnant of it at the end of half 

 a century of residence in New England, from some experience 

 with folk of Quaker stock. There are to my mind no more 

 estimable people in the world than those that owe their nurture 

 to that sect. Among them I have found dear friends, but there 

 is here too, though with a distinction I cannot grasp, the same 

 sense of ill adjustment. This is but one of the many things that 

 go to show that we feel many points in our contacts with our 

 fellows which we do not and cannot cognize. 



Mr. Ticknor's house and that of Mr. Dixwell were the only 

 homes to which I was accustomed to resort. To Agassiz's, in 

 my school days, I never went save on an errand ; the reason for 



