I account it one of the greatest privileges of my visit to America that Mrs. Garrison introduced me to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by appointment I had an hour and a half’s chat with him in the last year of his long life.  He was the only survivor of a famous band of New England writers, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman were dead.  His memory was failing, and he forgot some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly and he woke to full animation when I objected to the fatalism of heredity as being about as paralysing to effort as the fatalism of Calvinism.  As a medical man (and we are apt to forget the physician in the author) he took strong views of heredity.  As a worker among our destitute children, I considered environment the greater factor of the two, and spoke of children of the most worth less parents who had turned out well when placed early in respectable and kindly homes.  Before I left, the author presented me with an autograph copy of one of his books—­a much-prized gift.  He was reading Cotton Mather’s “Memorabilia,” not for theology, but for gossip.  It was the only chronicle of the small beer of current events in the days of the witch persecutions, and the expulsion of the Quakers, Baptists, and other schismatics.  I have often felt proud that of all the famous men I have mentioned in this connection there was only one not a Unitarian, and that was Whittier, the Quaker poet of abolition; and his theology was of the mildest.

Another notable man with whom I had three hours’ talk was Charles Dudley Warner, the humorous writer.  I am not partial to American humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley Warner I always appreciated.  In our talk I saw his serious side, for he was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State, on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories.  He told me that he never talked in train:  but during the three hours’ journey to New York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided ourselves, and we each talked of our separate interests, and enjoyed the talk right through.  Mrs. Harriet Beeclier Stowe I saw, but her memory was completely gone.  With Julia Ward Howe, the writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” I spent a happy time.  She had been the President of the New England Women’s Club for 25 years, and was a charming and interesting woman.  I was said to be very like her, and, indeed was often accosted by her name; but I think probably the reason was partly my cap, for Howe always wears one, and few other American ladies do.  Whenever I was with her I was haunted by the beautiful lines from the closing verse of the “Battle Hymn”—­

    In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born, across the sea,
    With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
    As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
    While God is marching on.