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When General Ward drove the British out of Roxbury in the reign of George the Third, the valuation of the town was about sixty thousand dollars. I do not know at what high figure the historic city that guards the ashes of John Eliot is held now, but I do know that, in this age of rapacious corporations and untrustworthy trusts, genius outranks gold, and that Roxbury receives no small increment of her value from the fact that Edward E. Hale is one of her most distinguished citizens. To one fond of perceiving the innate or accidental fitness of things, it is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that Doctor Hale lives on Highland Street, and that his house reminds one, with its massive front and Ionic columns, of a Greek temple.

This large house was built, about sixty years ago, by Mr. Bradford, for his brother-in-law, Reverend Mr. Kent, and was used for a young ladies’ boarding-school. Even now, on some of the upper panes, girls’ names and girlish sentiments are to be read. When Doctor Hale took the house, some twenty years ago, he introduced a carpenter to make what are called “modern improvements.”

“Mr. Hale,” said the carpenter, after a thorough inspection, “you are fortunate in your bargain. This house was built on honor.” Mr. Hale has had a great mind to make this reply the motto over his doorway.

When Doctor Hale once described his house to an eminent editor of one of our leading magazines, he said: “You cannot mistake it; it is a Greek temple just above Eliot Square.”

The editor, with the gentle blush that frisky memory will bring to the cheeks of the staidest, quickly answered: “Yes, I have often worshipped there.”

This is not a biographical paper. The readers of the “Atlantic” will remember Doctor Hale’s description of his father, the first of New England’s great railroad pioneers. Every one knows that our Mr. Hale was named after his uncle, the great Edward Everett; but perhaps it is not so generally known that Mrs. Hale is the granddaughter of Lyman Beecher, and the niece of Mrs. Stowe. What may not be expected of Doctor Hale’s boys, with Beecher, Hale, and Everett blood in their veins? There is no better selection, and the problem is an interesting one.

But, to many of us, the most interesting of Doctor Hale’s connections is his distant relation, Helen Kellar. The first time that wonderful, blind, deaf-mute 292 child, then not eight years old, came to his home, there happened to be an Egyptian statuette of the god Terminus outside the piazza steps. The child touched it, and, with her marvellous discernment, starting back, said in her own way: “Oh, the ugly old man!”

Helen was then taken to the beautiful alto-relievo of Bernini, representing the infants Christ and John playing together. It is a little thing, and slowly the child ran her eye-fingers over the chubby babes. Suddenly her sightless face lighted with the rarest smile. Her soul had understood the significance of the holy group by an intuition that science cannot gauge, and she bent over and kissed the sacred children.

After all, every home exhibits a clinging pananthropoism, if one may be permitted to coin the word. Books and pictures and statuary are the man, just as much as