Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[278] tomahawk and scalping-knife were looked for, what bearskin or bareskin, or whether it was that I had omitted the customary war-whoop, -this never was explained. Perhaps it was as in Irving's case, who thought his kind reception in England due to the fact that he used a goose-quill in his hand instead of sticking it in his hair,--a distinction which lost all its value, however, with the advent of steel pens. At any rate, my reception was as kind as possible, though my interest in Froude, being based wholly on his early book, “The Nemesis of faith,” was somewhat impaired by the fact that he treated that work as merely an indiscretion of boyhood, and was more interested in himself as the author of a history, which, unluckily, I had not then read. We met better upon a common interest in Carlyle, a few days later, and he took me to see that eminent author, and to join the afternoon walk of the two in Hyde Park. Long ago, in the “Atlantic monthly,” I described this occasion, and dwelt on the peculiar quality of Carlyle's laugh, which, whenever it burst out in its full volume, had the effect of dissolving all the clouds of his apparent cynicism and leaving clear sky behind. Whatever seeming ungraciousness had preceded, his laugh revealed the genuine humorist at last, so that he almost seemed to have been