To resume about the Aldrich Memorial affair: I had not inquired into the amount of travel which would be required. It came near being great, for I had supposed we must go to New York and reship thence to Boston, which would have made a hard day of it, considering the character of the weather. And a long day—a very long day—twelve hours between getting out of bed at home and stepping into the hotel in Boston. But by accident we found out that we could change cars at South Norwalk and save four hours, so we reached Boston at two in the afternoon, after a dusty and blistering and rather fatiguing journey. We were to go to Portsmouth next day, June 30th. Printed cards had been distributed by mail to the invited guests containing transportation-information. Whereby it appeared that the nine o’clock express for Portsmouth would have a couple of special cars sacred to the guests. To anybody but me, to any reasonable person, to any unprejudiced person, the providing of special cars by the surviving richⒶtextual note Aldriches would have seemed so natural a thing, so properly courteous a thing—in fact so necessary and unavoidable a politeness—that the information would have excited no comment, but would have been unemotionally received as being a wholly matter-of-course thing;Ⓐtextual note but where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts and feelings and opinions. I was [begin page 248] full of prejudice, and so I resented this special train. I said to myself that it was out of character; that it was for other people, ordinary people, the general run of the human race, to provide the simple courtesy of a special train on an occasion like this and pay the cost of it, but it was not for Mrs. Aldrich to do such a thing; it was not for Mrs. Aldrich to squander money on politeness to guests, eleemosinarilyⒶtextual note rich as she is. It irritated me, disappointed me, affronted me, to see her rising above herself under the elevating influence of a high family occasion; in my malice I wanted to find some way to account for it that would take the credit out of it, and so I said to myself that she, the great advertiser, the persistent advertiser, the pushing and scrabbling and tireless advertiser,Ⓐtextual note was doing this gaudy thing for the sake of spreading it around in the newspapers and getting her compensation out of it as an advertisement. That seemed a sort of plausible way of accounting for it, but I was so deeply prejudiced that it did not pacify me; I could not reconcile myself to seeing her depart from herself and from her traditions and be hospitable at her own expense—still, Ⓐtextual noteshe was defeating me, and I had to confess it and take the medicine. However, in my animosity I said to myself that I would not allow her to collect glory from me, at an expense to her of two dollars and forty cents, so I made Paine buy tickets to Portsmouth and return. That idea pleased me; indeed there is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty actsⒶtextual note of a nobler sort.

But Paine and I went into one of the two special cars in order to chat with their occupants, who would be male and female authors—friends, some of them, the rest acquaintances. It was lucky that we went in there, the result was joyous. I was sitting where I could carry on a conversational yell with all the males and females at the northern end of the car,Ⓐtextual note when the conductor came along, austere and dignified, as is the way of his breed of animals, and began to collect tickets! Several of the guests in my neighborhood I knew to be poor, and I saw—not with any real pleasure—a gasp of surprise catch in their throats and a pathetic look of distress exhibit itself in their faces. They pulled out of their pockets and their reticules the handsomely engraved card of invitation, along with the card specifying the special train, and offered those credentials to the unsympathetic conductor and explained that they were invited Ⓐtextual note to the mortuary festival and did not have to pay. The smileless conductor-devil said with his cold and hollowⒶtextual note Boston and Maine Railway bark,Ⓐtextual note that he hadn’t any orders to pass anybody, and he would trouble them for transportation-cash.

The incident restored my Mrs. Aldrich to me undamaged and just the same oldⒶtextual note thing she had always been, undeodorized and not a whiff of her missing.Ⓐtextual note Here she was, rich by an old gull’sⒶtextual note almsⒺexplanatory note, getting all the glory inseparable from the act of indulging in the imposing grandeur of a special train, and in the valuable advertising for herself incident to it, and then stepping aside and leaving her sixty hard-worked breadwinnersⒶtextual note to pay the bill for her. I realized that I had gotten back my lost treasure, the real Mrs. Aldrich, and that she was “all there,” as the slang-mongers phrase it. There was another detail of this sorrowful incident that was undeniably pitiful: persons unused to the luxurious Pullman car and accustomed to travel in the plebeian common car, have the fashion of sticking [begin page 249] their fare tickets in the back of the seat in front of them, where the conductor can see them as he goes along; on a New England railway the conductor goes along every few minutes, glances at the exposed tickets, punches some holes in them, and keeps that up all day, until the ticket has at last ceased to be a ticket and consists only of holes; but in the meantime the owner of the ticket has been at peace, he has been saved the trouble of pulling a ticket out of his vest pocket every two or three minutes. Now then, these special-trainⒶtextual note guests, naturally thinking that their engraved invitation-card was intended to serve as a pay-ticketⒶtextual note, had stuck it in the backⒶtextual note of the seats in front of them so that the conductor could turn it into a colander with his punch and leave the ownerⒶtextual note unmolested; and now, when they pointed out these cards to him with a confident and self-complacent and slightly rebukative air, and he responded, by his countenance, with a pointedly irreverent though silent scoff, those people were visibly so ashamed, so humiliated, that I think Mrs. Aldrich herself would have been almost sorry for them. I was noble enough to be sorry for them—so sorry that I almost wished I hadn’t seen it. There were sixty guests, ten or fifteen of them from New York, the rest from Boston and thereabouts, and the entire transportation bill could have been covered by a hundred and fifty dollars, yet that opulent and stingy woman was graceless enough to let that much-sacrificing company of unwealthy literary people pay the bill out of their own pockets. When I used to see her hanging around poor happy old Mr. Pierce’s neck and caressing and fondling him and kissing him on both cheeks, and calling him “dearie”— ButⒶtextual note let that go. I am often subject to seasickness on land, and nearly any little thing can give me the heaves.Ⓐtextual note

At a way station the governor of Massachusetts came on board with his staff—these in modestⒶtextual note uniform,Ⓐtextual note with two exceptions; these exceptions wereⒶtextual note veritable birds of paradise for splendor. One of themⒶtextual note was young Aldrich, the remaining child and heir. He is a nice and modest and engaging lad of thirty-eight, but his modesty goes for nothing; he is his mother’s property, as his father was before him, and will have to be a staff officerⒺexplanatory note, or any other kind of wax figure she may prefer, if so be there is an advertisement in it.

Every now and then in the special train some lamb, undergoing the slaughter, would inquire of some other lamb who this train was in charge of; there was never a lamb that could answer that question; manifestlyⒶtextual note the special train was not in charge of anybody; there was nobody at the Boston Station to tell any guest where to go or which were the special cars; there was nobody on board the train to see that the tin-potⒶtextual note boyⒺexplanatory note came around, now and then, in the awful swelter of that scorching day; at Portsmouth there was nobody to take charge of any guests save the governor’s party and about a dozen others. The Madam’s motor car, which is now a real one, and a sumptuous and costly one, was there to fetch the governor—free of charge, I heard.

AtⒶtextual note the Opera House about three-fourths of the special-trainⒶtextual note guests were sent to seats among the general audience, while the governor and staff and several more or less notorious authors were marshaled into the greenroomⒶtextual note to wait until the house should be fullⒺexplanatory note and everything ready for the solemnities to begin. The mayorⒺexplanatory note of Portsmouth was there too, a big, hearty, muscular animal, just the ideal municipal mayor of this present squalid century. Presently we marched in ontoⒶtextual note the stage, receiving the noisy welcome [begin page 250] which was our due. Howells and I followed the mayor and the governor and his staff, and the rest of the literary rabble followed us. We sat down in a row stretching across the stage, Howells sitting with me near the centreⒶtextual note in a short willow sofa. HeⒶtextual note glanced down the line and murmured,

“What an old-time, pleasant look it has about it!Ⓐtextual note if we were blacked and had sharp-pointed long collars that projected slanting upward past our eyebrows like railway bars, it would be complete;Ⓐtextual note and if Aldrich were here he would want to break out in the old introductory formula of happy memory and say breezily, ‘How is you to-night BrerⒶtextual note Bones? How is you feelin’,Ⓐtextual note BrerⒶtextual note TambourineⒶtextual note? How’s yo’Ⓐtextual note symptoms seem to segashuate disⒶtextual note ebenin’?’ ”Ⓐtextual note

After a time the mayor stepped to the front and thundered forth a vigorous and confident speech in which he said many fine and deservedly complimentary things about Aldrich, and described the gentle and dreamy and remote Portsmouth of Aldrich’s boyhood of sixty years ago and compared it with the booming Portsmouth of to-day. He didn’t use that word; it would have been injudicious; he only implied it. The Portsmouth of to-day doesn’t boom; it is calm, quite calm, and asleep. Also he told about the gathering together of the Aldrich mementoes and the stocking of Aldrich’s boyhood home with part of them, and the stocking of a fireproof building in the yard with the rest of them, and the placing of the whole generous deposit in the hands of an Aldrich Museum Corporation, with the privilege of saving it for posterity at the expense of the city.

Then Governor Guild——but let that go, until to-morrow.Ⓐtextual note