Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[293] tree and talking unreservedly, when they discovered, by a rustling in the boughs overhead, that two New York reporters had taken position in the branches and were putting down the conversation. Fortunately, I saw on the drawing-room table an open letter from one of the ladies just mentioned, announcing my approach, and it lay near a window, through which, as I had been told, the master of the house did not hesitate to climb, by way of escape from any unwelcome visitor.

I therefore sent up my name. Presently I heard a rather heavy step in the adjoining room, and there stood in the doorway the most un-English looking man I had yet seen. He was tall and high-shouldered, careless in dress, and while he had a high and domed forehead, yet his brilliant eyes and tangled hair and beard gave him rather the air of a partially reformed Corsican bandit, or else an imperfectly secularized Carmelite monk, than of a decorous and well-groomed Englishman. He greeted me shyly, gave me his hand, which was in those days a good deal for an Englishman, and then sidled up to the mantelpiece, leaned on it, and said, with the air of a vexed schoolboy, “I am rather afraid of you Americans; your countrymen do not treat me very well. There was Bayard Taylor” --and then