Persons and Places: First Friends and Harvard College

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

9

AT THE age of sixteen I began to notice the characters and quality of the other boys, and to find my ideal affinities. I say ideal affinities because I had always had instinctive or canine friends: boys or girls — for there were several girls — with whom I played or prattled, or danced at the dancing school.

There, at about the age of ten, T had a sort of amourette: absolutely groundless and silent, but absolutely determined. I remember the child perfectly. She had a dark complexion and curly black hair, and stood very straight, but gracefully. She was the first example to me of that admirable virtue cultivated by French actresses: eloquent stillness. I don’t think she ever said a word, and I very few; but we always took each other out to dance, and were partners for the cotillion. Her name was Alice White, and I have never seen or heard of her since then. It was the friendship of two genteel kittens who played gravely with the same ball and eschewed the rest of the litter.

A less enigmatic companionship of my boyhood was with Charlie Davis. He was a soft blond youth, a little older and taller than I, but mentally younger; our great pleasure was to laugh about everything, like silly girls. But in our daily walks from school we must have gabbled on many subjects, because after some years — he left school young to go into an office—he became a Catholic, and asked me to be his sponsor at his christening. I was; and I remember later his desire to enter a religious order. Let us hope, if I didn’t save my own soul, that I saved the sold of Charlie Davis.

My first real friend was Bentley Warren. We two with Dick Smith (who afterwards took his mother’s name, Weston) formed what we called the Triumvirate. Warren’s father, who had recently died, had been a Democratic Congressman, elected in an off year of public dissatisfaction in a suburb of Boston, usually Republican; but two years of life in Washington, together with inherited dissentient opinions, had given his son a freer intelligence and a more varied experience than little Bostonians were likely to have. I often went to Mrs. Warren’s on holidays to tea; and Warren sometimes came to lunch at our house.

His Democratic views, if he had them, were not rabid; his most intimate friends were Harry and Jim Garfield, sons of the future President of the United States; and he left school at the end of our second class year in order to enter Williams College with the Garfields, a year before the rest of us were expected to be ready for the university. Dick Smith, too, on account of the tiff his father had with the headmaster, left school early during our last year; so that as far as friendship was concerned -— so new to me but so important — the end of my school life might have been desolate.

Not that my relations with Warren were broken off: we wrote each other long letters; and four years later, in 1885, I went to Williamstown for the festivities at his graduation. I think it was my first journey undertaken merely for pleasure, and at my own expense.

I went to Williams again twenty or twenty-five years later, to read a lecture on Shelley. Harry Garfield was president of the College; we spoke of Bentley Warren and of the old days, but with how different a sentiment! For me those things had passed into the empyrean, into an eternal calm where their littleness or their greatness was nothing and their quality, their essence, everything; for him they were merely early unimportant phases of the business which occupied him now, and not to be regarded on their own account. When I mentioned Bentley Warren, Garfield said: “Oh, yes. He is one of the Trustees of our College.” From this! gathered two things: that Warren had been “successful” and was now rich; and that for Garfield this fact was what counted in Warren, rather than their early friendship.

My school friends were gone; but just beyond school bounds a new friend appeared, Edward Bayley. I was lieutenant colonel of the Boston School Regiment, the colonel that year being from the English High School, which, back to back with the Latin School, was housed in the other half of the same new building. In some matter of vital importance to our forces it became necessary for me to consult my superior officer. We met by appointment, and found that the high questions of epaulettes or of buttons were soon disposed of; but that first interview made us fast friends. We happened to live in the same quarter of the town, the Back Bay, about a mile from our schools, and we at once established the custom of waiting, he for me or I for him, at the corner, so as to walk home together.

That winter my mother moved to Roxbury, having at last got rid of the dreadful burden of our Beacon Street house; so that I saw my new friend only occasionally, or by express appointment. But that made no difference. The bond was established, silently of course, but safely. Even the fact that he was not going to college, but directly into some place of business, so that, as it actually came about, we never saw each other after that year, and hardly a letter passed between us, made no difference in our friendship, though it entirely separated our lives. Strange enchantment! Even today, the thought of that youthful comradeship, without incidents, without background, and without a sequel, warms the cockles of my heart like a glass of old port.

Is that all? What did he do? What did he say? What did he stand for? I confess that after sixty years I have to invent a theory to account for this fact. Why did a strictly Puritan and inward religion in him, far from producing narrowness or fanaticism, produce charity and hospitality of mind? Not that he was in the least what was called liberal — that is, indifferent and vaguely contemptuous towards all definite doctrines or practices, and without any discipline of his own. On the contrary he was absolutely loyal to his own tradition, and master of it; he was made, finished, imposing in the precision of his affections.

I may be reading ideals of my own into that very young man, in whom nothing of the sort may ever have come to light; but potentially I cannot help thinking that in him there was something his spiritual forebears never possessed: I mean humility and renunciation. A dumb inglorious Milton who was not a prig, an Emerson with warm blood, who was not proud or oracular or cosmographical, and never thought himself the center of the universe. Young Bayley was my first, perhaps my fundamental, model for The Last Puritan.

It was doubtless the discovery that we were both — but differently — religious that made us so quickly sure of each other. Never was trust more instinctive, more complete, or more silent. It has lasted in silence, at least on my side, for sixty years. Not long ago I asked a Boston friend who turned up at Cortina about these very first friends of mine, Warren and Bayley. Did he know them? Were they still living? What had become of them? And I was not surprised to hear the warmest eulogy of both, although my informant was a Lyman of the Lymans and a Lowell of the Lowells, while Warren and Bayley were not descendants of the Boston Brahmins. And I said to myself, “Oh, my prophetic soul!” My earliest friendships were not illusions.

10

IF fortune has been unkind to me in respect to my times, — except that for the intellectual epicure the 1890’s were enjoyable, — in respect to the places fortune has been most friendly, setting me down not in any one center, where things supposed to be important or exciting were happening, but in various quiet places from which cross-vistas opened into the world. Of these places the most familiar to me, after Avila, was the Harvard Yard. I lived there for eleven years, first as an undergraduate, later as an instructor and proctor.

No place, no rooms, no mode of living could have been more suitable for a poor student and a free student, such as I was and as I wished to be. My first room, on the ground floor in the northeast corner of Hollis, was one of the cheapest to be had in Cambridge: the rent was $44 a year. I had put it first for that reason on my list of desired rooms, and I got my first choice. It was so cheap because it had no bedroom, no water, and no heating; also the ground floor seems to have been thought less desirable, perhaps because the cellar below might increase the cold or the dampness. I don’t think I was ever cold there in a way to disturb me or to affect my health. I kept the hard-coal fire banked and burning all night, except from Saturday to Monday, when I slept at my mother’s at Roxbury.

An undergraduate’s room in any case is not a good place for study, unless it be at night, under pressure of some special task. At other times, there are constant interruptions, or temptations to interrupt oneself: recitations, lectures, meals, walks, meetings, and sports. I soon found the Library the best place to work in. It was not crowded; a particular alcove where there were philosophical books at hand, and foreign periodicals, soon became my regular place for reading.

As to my lodging, I had to make up my sofa bed at night before getting into it; in the morning I left the bedding to be aired, and the “goody,” whose services were included in the rent, put it away when she came to dust or to sweep. I also had to fetch my coal and water from the cellar, or the water in summer from the College pump that stood directly in front of my door. This was economy on my part, as I might have paid the janitor to do it for me; perhaps also to black my boots, which I always did myself, as I had done it at home.

But my life was a miracle of economy. I had an allowance from my mother of $750 a year to cover all expenses. Tuition absorbed $150; rent, $44; board at Memorial Hall, with a reduction for absence during the week-end, about $200; which left less than one dollar a day for clothes, books, fares, subscriptions, amusements, and pocket money. Yet on my less than one dollar a day I managed to dress decently, to belong to minor societies like the Institute, the Pudding, and the O.K., where the fees were moderate, to buy all necessary books, and even, in my junior year, to stay at rich people’s houses, and to travel. Robert had given me his old evening clothes, which fitted me well enough: otherwise the rich people’s houses could not have been visited.

Doing my “chores” was something I rather liked, as I still brush and pack my own clothes for pleasure, and shave myself, and walk everywhere rather than drive, circumstances permitting. A little manual work or physical exercise changes the stops agreeably, lengthens the focus and range of vision, reverts to the realm of matter which is the true matrix of mind, and generally brings judgment and feeling back into harmony with nature. I have never had a manservant, and later when I lived in hotels I seldom called on the servants for any personal service not in their common routine. This trait is a heritage from the humble condition of my father’s family and my mother’s reduced circumstances during my boyhood. I had not an aristocratic breeding; not only was I not served, but I was taught no aristocratic accomplishments — not even riding or driving or shooting.

What is a gentleman? A gentleman is a man with a valet; originally he also had a sword, but in my time that was obsolete except for officers in full uniform; a bank account could take its place. But having many servants, though it makes a man a master, does not make him a gentleman. He is not one because his wife may keep servant girls in the house; he is one only if he has a body servant of his own. This defines the Spanish gentleman as well as the English gentleman. To be a complete gentleman he should also have a horse, and should ride it gallantly. Don Quixote, too, had a horse, as well as a servant.

Life in the Yard for me, during my second period of residence there, 1890-1896, had a different quality. I hadn’t a horse or a valet, but could count on enough pocket money, a varied circle of friends, clubs, and ladies’ society in Boston and Cambridge, and the foreglow and afterglow of holidays spent in Europe. The first year, when I had only one foot in the stirrup and was not yet in the saddle as a Harvard teacher, I lived in Thayer; graceless quarters and the insecure stammering beginnings of a lecturer.

The next year I again had my pick of rooms in the Yard, securing No. 7 Stoughton, in the southeast corner of the first floor, where I stayed for six winters. Here there was a bedroom, and my coal and water were brought up for me by the janitor; on the other hand I often made my own breakfast — tea, boiled eggs, and biscuits — and always my tea in the afternoon, for I had now lived in England and learned the comforts of a bachelor in lodgings. Only — what would not have happened in England — I washed my own dishes and ordered my tea, eggs, milk, and sugar from the grocers: domestic cares that pleased me and that preserved my nice china, a present from Howard Cushing, during all those years. There was a round bathtub under my cot, and my sister’s crucifix on the wall above it: only cold water, but the contents of the kettle boiling on the hearth served to take off the chill. I had also acquired a taste for fresh air, and my window was always a little open.

One day a new goody left the bathtub full of slops, explaining that she hadn’t known what to do with it; it was the only bathtub in her entry. I had myself taken only recently to a daily sponge bath. When I was an undergraduate few ever took a bath in Cambridge; those who lodged in private houses might share one bathroom between them, and those who went to the Gymnasium might have a shower bath after exercise; but your pure “grind” never bathed, and I only when I went home for the weekend.

My father used to say that the English had introduced baths into Christendom from India; but I suspect that it was luxury and the femmes galantes of the eighteenth century that did it. What could be more un-English than a languid female in a turban, not unattended, and not without a semi-transparent clinging garment, like that of a statue, getting in or out of a marble bath like an ancient sarcophagus, itself draped and lined with linen sheets? These were the refinements of luxury and mature coquetry. And the Christian background appears in the gown worn in the bath, according to the monastic precept of never being wholly naked. No such scruple exists in England or among athletes. The tone there is masculine and hardy, with a preference for cold water and the open air. Robert Bridges, the most complete of Englishmen, at the age of eighty, used to take his cold bath every morning in the lounge-hall of his house, before a roaring wood fire. Here was Sparta rather than India transported to the chilly North.

In Spain, in those days, there were no baths in houses. My sister procured an immense zinc tub, in the middle of which, when it was full, a special stove had to be introduced to heat the water, which a special donkey laden with four earthen jars had to carry from the fountain; the thing didn’t work, and I doubt that she took more than one or two baths. For me she got a manageable little hip bath which I found quite sufficient.

Hollis and Stoughton were twin red-brick buildings of the eighteenth century, solid, simple, symmetrical, and not unpleasing. No effort had been made by the builders towards picturesqueness or novelty; they knew what decent lodgings for scholars were, and that there was true economy in building them well. The rectangular wooden window frames divided into many squares, flush with the walls, and painted white, served for a modest and even gay decoration.

On the whole, it was the architecture of sturdy poverty, looking through thrift in the direction of wealth. It well matched the learning of early New England, traditionally staunch and narrow, yet also thrifty and tending to positivism; a learning destined, as it widened, to be undermined and to become, like the architecture, flimsy and rich. It had been founded on accurate Latin and a spellbound constant reading of the Bible; but in the Harvard of my day we had heard a little of everything, and nobody really knew his Latin or knew his Bible.

You might say that the professor of Hebrew knew his Bible, and the professors of Latin their Latin. No doubt, in the sense that they could write technical articles on the little points of controversy at the moment among philologists; but neither Latin nor the Bible flowed through them and made their spiritual lives; they were not vehicles for anything great. They were grains in a quicksand, agents and patients in an anonymous moral migration that had not yet written its classics.

Holworthy Hall in my day had no baths, not even shower baths, and no central heating. Modern improvements seem to me in almost everything to be a blessing. Electricity, vacuum cleaning, and ladies’ kitchens render life simpler and more decent; but central heating, in banishing fireplaces, except as an occasional luxury or affectation, has helped to destroy the charm of home. I don’t mean merely the ancient and rustic sanctity of the hearth; I mean also the home comforts of the modern bachelor.

An obligatory fire was a useful and blessed thing. In northern climates it made the poetry of indoor life. Round it you sat, into it you looked, by it you read, in it you made a holocaust of impertinent letters and rejected poems. On the hob your kettle simmered, and the little leaping flames cheered your heart and ventilated your den. Your fire absolved you from half your dependence on restaurants, cafés, and servants; it also had the moralizing function of giving you a duty in life from which any distraction brought instant punishment, and taught you the feminine virtues of nurse, cook, and Vestal virgin.

Sometimes, I confess, these cares became annoying; the fire kept you company, but like all company it sometimes interrupted better things. At its best, a wood fire is the most glorious; but unless the logs are of baronial dimensions, it dies down too quickly, the reader or the writer is never at peace; while a hard-coal fire (which also sometimes goes out) sleeps like a prisoner behind its iron bars, without the liveliness of varied flames.

The ideal fire is soft coal, such as I had in England and also in America when I chose; like true beauty in woman, it combines brilliancy with lastingness. I congratulate myself that in the Harvard Yard I was never heated invisibly and willy-nilly by public prescription, but always by my own cheerful fire that made solitude genial and brought many a genial friend who loved cheerfulness to sit by it with me, not rejecting in addition a drink and a little poetry; no tedious epic, but perhaps one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or an ode of Keats, something fit to inspire conversation and not to replace it.

11

MY ELECTION to the Lampoon Board — because of some drawings I submitted — was a decisive event in my Harvard life. Two other freshmen, Felton and Sanborn, had also been elected; and they asked me to come and sit at their table in Memorial Hall. Felton’s chum, Baldwin, was also there, and some other friends; so I immediately found myself in a little circle of more or less lively wits that congregated every day at meals, apart from personal sympathies. In time, the inner circle narrowed down to four: the three I have mentioned and me. We kept up our comradeship at table for four years; and Sanborn and I became personal friends on intellectual grounds.

In those days freshmen at Harvard were still at school. Courses were prescribed, and we sat in alphabetical order, to be marked present or absent. Sanborn and I were therefore likely to sit next to each other: not always, because those who had passed in French had to take German, and vice versa, and in some subjects the two hundred and fifty freshmen were divided into more or less advanced classes. But I remember especially in Natural History 4, where Professor Shaler set forth “all the geology necessary to a gentleman,” sitting next to Sanborn. We had separate chairs but one running desk in front of us, so that we could easily look at each other’s notebooks; and we amused ourselves in matching triolets, not always on that “concatenation of phenomena” which Shaler was impressing upon us.

The room where Felton and Baldwin lived, No. 1 Thayer, was the reality under the literary fiction of a Lampoon “Sanctum.” We gathered there to compose our parts of the fortnightly edition; chiefly drawings, although sometimes the column of puns entitled “By the Way” was concocted by us cooperatively, in the midst of a thousand interruptions.

I never wrote for the Lampoon; even the text for my sketches was usually supplied for me by the others, who knew the idioms required. My English was too literary, too ladylike, too correct for such a purpose; and I never acquired, or liked, the American art of perpetual joking. What we printed was a severe selection from what we uttered: it had to be local, new or fresh, and at least apparently decent. Speech in this circle, if not always decent, never became lewd. There was an atmosphere of respect for holy things, of respect for distant or future ladyloves, and also of self-respect. We were not very intimate friends. The Lampoon, the Yard, the College had brought us together; and when we scattered, the comradeship ceased. I scarcely knew what became of Felton or Baldwin.

The man who gave the tone to the Lampoon at that time was Eugene Thayer, not one of our group. He seemed a man apart, and his wit was not so much jocular as Mercutio-like, curious and whimsical, as if he saw the broken edges of things that appear whole. There was some obscurity in his play with words, and a feeling (which I shared) that the absurd side of things is pathetic. Probably nothing in his later performance may bear out what I have just said of him, because American life was then becoming unfavorable to idiosyncrasies, and the current smoothed and rounded out all the odd pebbles.

In our last year or two, the Lampoon possessed a business manager whose name is known everywhere, and who is identified, perhaps more than anyone else, with that inexorable standardizing current — namely, William R. Hearst. He was little esteemed in the College. The fact that his father was a millionaire and a Senator from California gave him an independence that displeased the undergraduate mind, and his long cigars were bad form in the Yard.

Yet his budding powers as a newspaper owner and manager made him invaluable to the Lampoon in its financial difficulties. He not only knew how to secure advertisements, but he presented us with a material Sanctum, carpeted, warmed by a stove, and supplied with wooden armchairs and long tables at which all the illustrated comic papers in the world were displayed as exchanges for our little local and puerile Lampy. How easily a little cool impudence can deceive mankind!

To the Harvard Yard in spirit, though not topographically, may be assigned my other contacts with college life during those first four years. Athletics did not figure among them. I never took any exercise except walking, and I seldom went, as yet, even to watch the games, which in the case of football was then done as in England, standing at the side lines, the crowd being kept back only by a chalk mark or a rope.

This “Harvard indifference” was not due to intense study on my part or to misanthropy. I played the leading lady in the Institute theatricals of 1884; and two years later, though I no longer looked at all deceptive in feminine clothes, I was one of the ballet in the Hasty Pudding play. These amusements, with rehearsals and a noisy trip to New York as a theatrical company, involved a good deal of intimacy for the moment.

More intellectual, at least nominally, were the literary groups or societies of which, for me, the O.K. and the Harvard Monthly, when that was founded, were the most important. The members of the two were largely the same, and included Lampoon men as well; but the O.K., which later gave excellent dinners, had the advantage of running over into the class of merely intelligent or even athletic leaders of the College. In a commercial civilization, these were likely to be much better beings than (he professional scholars or intellectuals, better beings even than the future lawyers, though these might have more historical and rhetorical attainments.

The Harvard Monthly was founded by A. B. Houghton, afterwards American Ambassador at Berlin and London. His literary quality was in marked contrast with Sanborn’s, as were also his character and fate. Houghton was as rich as Sanborn was poor; he was ambitious and bitter, nominally preoccupied with socialism and pessimism — not, I think, in a clear speculative spirit, but rather as scandals and dangers that the leaders of liberalism and plutocracy must somehow overcome. His conscience and critical faculty were not at peace about the way in which his father made money: it was chiefly in a glass factory, and the son would ask himself how many glass blowers died each year from blowing into those furnaces.

I knew Houghton very well; we discussed all manner of subjects. In 1898 he unexpectedly made me a visit in Brattle Street. He glanced about my quarters disapprovingly, sucked his enormous cigar, and said magisterially that it was a sad mistake to try to swim against the stream. I have never been aware of swimming against any stream: I have merely stood on the bank or paddled about in the quiet backwaters. From there I may have observed that the torrent was carrying down more or less wreckage. My philosophy throws no challenge to those who rush down the very middle of the rapids and rejoice in their speed.

I will say nothing more about the Harvard Yard. It has lost its character and its importance. When President Lowell was planning his “Houses” to be built by the river, he very kindly urged me to remain and take part in the experiment. 1 could have lived very like a don at Oxford or Cambridge. But it was too late. My heart might have been in the thing twenty years earlier, and perhaps then the transformation of Harvard into a University of Colleges might have been socially more successful. But by 1912 the non-collegiate additions had become too important for such a reorganization.

The community too had outgrown the instinct for a secluded life. Colleges were fundamentally conventual and religious; on which foundation specific precious traditions, social and sporting, might develop together with an exact but familiar and humanistic learning. Now looser, wider, more miscellaneous interests had invaded every mind. But I am not writing a history of Harvard University. I know very little about it. I knew only the Harvard Yard.

12

THE chief event of my freshman year occurred towards the end of it. I received — what was unprecedented— a note from home, asking me to be in my room on the following evening, because my mother and sisters were coming to lay before me an important proposal. I guessed at once what it would be, although no hint had been dropped on the subject. I was to go to Spain that summer to see my father.

My mother evidently felt profoundly the recent relief to her finances, and wished to be generous. Sending me to college, even on my modest allowance, had already consumed perhaps a fourth of her income; yet she still had money to spare, and desired to do more. She had done nothing for my father during these ten years; in her view she had done nothing for me; for giving me food and lodging and a hundred dollars a year for clothes, books, and pocket money was something she owed to herself. She would not have allowed a child of hers to beg or go in rags; and even in sending me to college she was carrying out a plan of her own, and trying to make me into what she wished me to be, rather than into what my father or I secretly desired.

But now, in letting me go to see him, she was doing us an unselfish kindness, relenting as it were and letting us, for a moment, have our own way. Neither my father nor I had made any such suggestion ; but it was impossible that he shouldn’t wish to see his son grown up; and everybody knew at home how I longed to travel, to see again with my own eyes old towns, cathedrals, castles, and palaces, and also the classic landscape of Europe: because in America, at least in the parts I knew, nature as well as society seemed to lack contrast and definition, as if everything were half formed and groping after its essence.

Late in June I started accordingly on my first journey alone, and sailed from New York for Antwerp. Robert had looked up the various routes possible, and it had been decided that I should go and return by the Belgian or Red Star Line. The ship was decent as standards stood in those days, but second-rate, perhaps of 5000 tons; and as usual I was dreadfully seasick; so much so that the doctor and the stewardess took pity on me, some ladies became interested (I was nineteen years old), and a bed was rigged up for me on deck, where, as they said, I should enjoy the sunshine and the air.

The fresh air was indeed a relief but the glare an added nuisance; and the coming and going of people, and their talk, only intensified the general instability of everything. I was too ill for the moment to be ashamed of myself; but when I once got back to my cabin, although I wasn’t alone even there, the feeling of shame came over me. They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone.

When I appeared on deck again, looking and feeling perfectly well, shaved and in fresh linen, I was congratulated. One particular lady of uncertain age, who now explained that she was Mrs. X of Cincinnati, Ohio, had to be thanked for the kindness she had shown, or at least intended, on the day of that disgusting exhibition which I was heartily sorry to have made of myself. A young man should be hardier, and I had been sicker than any girl. Mrs. X had brought me a raw egg in brandy, and insisted I should swallow it, which I had done with dire results: brandy on such occasions is a brutal remedy that my throat, not to say my stomach, abhors.

At Antwerp I had just time to see the market place, with the Cathedral spire like a group of inverted icicles rising above it; and inside, besides the general splendor of a great living place of worship, I admired the two magnificent, if theatrical, pictures by Rubens at the head of the two aisles, especially the “ Descent from the Cross.” Yet this is too classic, too Michelangelesque for Flanders; I could have wished to carry away some humbler and more intimate memories, but the gorgeousness of Rubens blotted out the rest.

In Paris I saw nothing, merely driving from one station to the other; but at the Gare d’Orléans I found myself in the sort of difficulty that inexperience will fall into. I was provided with just the amount of French money that I had calculated would be sufficient, leaving a decent margin for emergencies; and at the ticket office I asked, as planned, for a second-class ticket to Avila. I could have a ticket to Avila, the man said, but only first class for the express: the ordinary trains, with second and third class, would take more than two whole days for the journey. I counted my money. I could take a first-class ticket and have 15 francs left. Would that be enough for meals and tips on the journey? I would risk it. It was only thirty-six hours, two nights and one day; at a pinch, I could have a sandwich instead of a dinner. It wouldn’t kill me.

My 15 francs, however, were only just enough to pay my way on that first occasion; and I found at Irún that 1 had only a few coppers in my pocket and couldn’t telegraph to my father, as had been agreed, that I was arriving at 5.30 the next morning. It was broad daylight, being early in July, and I recognized the walls and the Cathedral tower, touched by the rising sun, before we reached the station. But there was nobody to receive me, and no vehicle. Not even anybody to carry my valise. I left it with the guard, and started alone on foot, immensely happy, and remembering perfectly that station road and the place among the first houses to the left, opposite the church and convent of Santa Ana, where Don Juan the Englishman’s house stood, which was now my father’s.

There it was, the middle one of three humble two-story buildings, not properly lined up, and painted in varying weather-worn yellows or grays, with red tiled roofs. I pounded the middle door with the knocker. No answer. Finally a neighbor, from a window over the bakery in the house to the left, put out her disheveled head and said, “Knock hard. They are all deaf in that house.” I knocked harder, until the window over my door was opened also, and another head, evidently the housemaid’s, peered out, and looked at me with an air of inquiry.

“Don Agustin lives here, doesn’t he? I am his son.” She smiled, wished me a good arrival, and said they were expecting me but not that morning. El Señor was still in bed; la Señora (his sister Maria Ignacia) was in the garden. And presently the door was opened for me.

At the end of the stone-paved passage running through the house, I could see the so-called garden, and my aged aunt standing there, stooping a little, with a watering pot in her hand. The maid tactfully ran ahead and announced me loudly, and after embracing my aunt, whom I had never seen before, I had some difficulty in making her hear and understand why I hadn’t telegraphed. Then I was led up to my father’s room, where the same embraces and the same explanations, under the same difficulties, were duly repeated. But it was all right now; and rather characteristic of a young son from half round the world to arrive home with just twopence in his pocket.