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[312] pedestrian in the sense of one who made excursions for pleasure. Time and opportunity were here desiderata.

My father's love of pets never forsook him—or, rather,1 of cats: towards dogs he had an aversion. With my mother the opposite was the case, though she yielded sweetly to his preference. When away from home, he thought of the well-being of puss as much as of that of any member of the family. ‘Remembrances to Mary Ann [the one maidservant]. My good — will to the cat. Love to all the friends’—seemed the natural order of affectionate solicitude in writing to his wife in 1858. And again to my2 mother from Albany: “I need not ask George to look after the cat during my absence, for he is my natural successor in that line—only he must not give her too much at a meal.” Ms. Feb. 8, 1857. ‘See that pussy is put down cellar,’ he wrote on a memorandum slip to one of us returning home3 after bedtime; ‘you will find plenty of milk for her and for yourself.’ I remember one cat who attached himself unbidden to the family (and was therefore distrusted as not having been bred from kittenhood), who used to mount my father's shoulders while carving at table. My father did not quite share a cat's local attachments. For his birthplace—meaning Newburyport and not the little4 house on School Street — for Boston, he had a deep and5 undying attachment; towards this or that house of the many which successively became his home, he evinced no6 special sentiment. He was, on the contrary, rather fond of moving into new houses—of being the first occupant. Such were those in Pine Street, in Suffolk Street, in Concord Street.

The love of a pretty face was inextinguishable in my7 father. It pleased him, as it does many a man, more than any other beautiful thing in nature. His aesthetic sense in general was uncultivated, but it would have repaid cultivating. He had a great fondness for pictures, with but little artistic discrimination, his modest purchases being often dictated by pure sentiment. His visit to the Louvre gave him pleasure, in spite of much that seemed

1 Ante, 1.30; 2.47, 48.

2 Ms. Oct. 28.

3 Ms. Feb. 21, 1878, to F. J. G.

4 Ante, 1.467.

5 Ante, 1.79; 2.407.

6 Ante, 2.51.

7 Ante, 1.29, 78.

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