George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[469]

You have not answered my note about a visit. Do not let that— the visit, I mean—be lost in the same thin air. I want to have a long talk or two with you, and never shall do it unless you come here. . . . .

Yours always, General or no General, but old classmate,

Geo. Ticknor.

When Mr. Ticknor made, on his seventy-sixth birthday, the list of his early friends,—from whom only death was to part him, ¹—he had already endured the pain of separation from nearly all those who were not destined to survive him. The death of Mr. Everett in January, 1865, was a shock from its extreme suddenness, and it broke up an intercourse which, for the previous fourteen or fifteen years, had been extremely close and confidential. Their meetings, when both were in Boston, were almost daily, and the number of notes which passed between them was so great as to cause amused comments in the family, on this lady-like or lover-like frequency of billets-doux.²

On the day of Mr. Everett's death Mr. Ticknor wrote to Mr. G. T. Curtis:—

Boston, Sunday, January 15, 1865.

my dear George,—Everett died of apoplexy this morning at about half past 4 o'clock.

I went to see him yesterday, because he was unwell, although I was, myself, not quite right for going out in bad weather. He was suffering from a terrible cold, which he caught last Monday, when he made a legal argument before referees about the damage done to his estate in Medford by the Charlestown water-works; and afterwards, before dinner, made the speech you have seen about the Savannah case. The doctor—Hayward—had been anxious about him at first, but was soon relieved of any apprehension of immediate danger, though he treated him tenderly, and visited him twice daily, watching him with care, as he said, because he was above seventy. When I saw