My first halt was in front of the conspicuous home of James Russell Lowell.  Now in the far recesses of the Five Towns I was brought up on “My Study Windows.”  My father, who would never accept the authority of an encyclopedia when his children got him in a corner on some debated question of fact, held James Russell Lowell as the supreme judge of letters, from whom not even he could appeal (It is true, he had never heard of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern fad.) And there were the study windows of James Russell Lowell!  And his house in its garden was only one of hundreds of similar houses standing in like old gardens.

It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-Revolution houses had not yet left the occupation of the families which built them.  Beautiful houses, a few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on the other side of the Atlantic!  Did not William Morris always maintain that wood was and forever would be the most suitable material for building a house?  On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses, whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge architecture, blown clean over by the gale.  But the gale that will deracinate Cambridge has not yet begun to rage....  I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow.  In spite of the fact that he wrote “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” he seems to keep his position as the chief minor poet of the English language.  And the most American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge was that the children of Cambridge had been guided to buy and make inalienable the land in front of his house, so that his descendant might securely enjoy the free prospect that Longfellow enjoyed.  In what other country would just such a delicate, sentimental homage have been paid in just such an ingeniously fanciful manner?[1]

[Footnote 1:  This story was related to me by a resident of Cambridge.  Mr. Richard H. Dana, Longfellow’s son-in-law, has since informed me that it is quite untrue.  I regret that it is quite untrue.  It ought to have been quite true.  The land in question was given by Longfellow’s children to the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city of Cambridge.  The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow an arm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic “spreading chestnut-tree,” under which stood a certain historic village smithy; and with this I suppose I must be content.—­A.B.]

[Illustration:  THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB—­OVERLOOKING THE RIVER]

After I had passed the Longfellow house it began to rain, and dusk began to gather in the recesses between the houses; and my memory is that, with an athletic and tireless companion, I walked uncounted leagues through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward a promised club that seemed ever to retreat before us with the shyness of a fawn.  However, we did at length capture it.  This club was connected with Harvard, and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the present chapter.