was for a while a free lance in literature. I did whatever came in my way, and sold my articles to the newspapers, going about from office to office, but I was finally offered a place in “The Nation,” where I obtained a fixed position at a salary. I had at times a sense that, by going abroad, I had fallen out of the American procession of progress; and, though I was elbowing my way energetically through the crowd, I seemed to have a tremendous difficulty in recovering my lost place on my native soil, and asserting my full right to it. So, when young men beg me to recommend them for consulships, I always feel in duty bound to impress on them this great danger of falling out of the procession, and asking them whether they have confidence in their ability to reconquer the place they have deserted, for while they are away it will be pretty sure to be filled by somebody else. A man returning from a residence of several years abroad has a sense of superfluity in his own country—he has become a mere supernumerary whose presence or absence makes no particular difference.

Boyesen. What year did you leave “The Nation” and assume the editorship of “The Atlantic”?

Howells. I took the editorship in 1872, but went to live in Cambridge six or seven years before. I was first assistant editor under James T. Fields, who was uniformly kind and considerate, and with whom I got along perfectly. It was a place that he could have made odious to me, but he made it delightful. I have the tenderest regard and the highest respect for his memory.

Boyesen. I need scarcely ask you if your association with Lowell was agreeable?

Howells. It was in every way charming. He was twenty years my senior, but he always treated me as an equal and a contemporary. And you know the difference between thirty and fifty is far greater than between forty and sixty, or fifty and seventy. I dined with him every week, and he showed the friendliest appreciation of the work I was trying to do. We took long 9 walks together; and you know what a rare talker he was. Somehow I got much nearer to him than to Longfellow. As a man, Longfellow was flawless. He was full of noble friendliness and encouragement to all literary workers in whom he believed.

Boyesen. Do you remember you once said to me that he was a most inveterate praiser?

Howells. I may have said that; for in the kindness of his heart, and his constitutional reluctance to give pain, he did undoubtedly often strain a point or two in speaking well of things. But that was part of his beautiful kindliness of soul and admirable urbanity. Lowell, you know, confessed to being “a tory in his nerves;” but Longfellow, with all his stateliness of manner, was nobly and perfectly democratic. He was ideally good; I think he was without a fault.

Boyesen. I have never known a man who was more completely free from snobbishness and pretence of all kinds. It delighted him to go out of his way to do a man a favor. There was, however, a little touch of Puritan pallor in his temperament, a slight lack of robustness; that is, if his brother’s biography can be trusted. What I mean to say is, that he appears there a trifle too perfect; too bloodlessly, and almost frostily, statuesque. I have always had a little diminutive grudge against the Reverend Samuel Longfellow for not using a single one of those beautiful anecdotes I sent him illustrative of the warmer and more genial side of the poet’s character. He evidently wanted to portray a Plutarchian man of heroic size, and he therefore had to exclude all that was subtly individualizing.

Howells. Well, there is always room for another biography of Longfellow.

Boyesen. At the time when I made your acquaintance in 1871, you were writing “Their Wedding Journey.” Do you remember the glorious talks we had together while the hours of the night slipped away unnoticed? We have no more of those splendid conversational rages now-a-days. How eloquent we were, to be sure; and with what delight you read those chapters on “Niagara,” “Quebec,” and “The St. Lawrence;” and with what rapture I listened! I can never read them without supplying the cadence of your voice, and seeing you seated, twenty-two years younger than now, in that cosey little library in Berkeley Street.

Howells. Yes; and do you mind our sudden attacks of hunger, when we would start on a foraging expedition into the cellar, in the middle of the night, and return, you with a cheese and crackers, and I with a watermelon and a bottle of champagne? What jolly meals we improvised! Only it is a wonder to me that we survived them.

Boyesen. You will never suspect what 10 an influence you exerted upon my fate by your friendliness and sympathy in those never-to-be-forgotten days. You Americanized me. I had been an alien, and felt alien in every fibre of my soul, until I met you. Then I became domesticated. I found a kindred spirit who understood me, and whom I understood; and that is the first and indispensable condition of happiness. It was at your house, at a luncheon, I think, that I met Henry James.

Howells. Yes; James and I were constant companions. We took daily walks together, and his father, the elder Henry James, was an incomparably delightful and interesting man.

Boyesen. Yes; I remember him well. I doubt if I ever heard a more brilliant talker.

Howells. No; he was one of the best talkers in America. And didn’t the immortal Ralph Keeler appear upon the scene during the summer of ’71 or ’72?

Boyesen. Yes; your small son “Bua” insisted upon calling him “Big Man Keeler” in spite of his small size.

Howells. Yes, Bua was the only one who ever saw Keeler life-size.

Boyesen. I remember how he sat in your library and told stories of his negro minstrel days and his wild adventures in many climes, and did not care whether you laughed with him or at him, but would join you from sheer sympathy, and how we all laughed in chorus until our sides ached!

Howells. Poor Keeler! He was a sort of migratory, nomadic survival; but he had fine qualities, and was well equipped for a sort of fiction. If he had lived he might have written the great American novel. Who knows?

Boyesen. Was not it at Cambridge that Björnstjerne Björnson visited you?

Howells. No; that was in 1881, at Belmont, where we went in order to be in the country, and give the children 11 the benefit of country air. When I met Björnson before, we had always talked Italian; but the first thing he said to me at Belmont, was: “Now we will speak English.” And when he had got into the house, he picked up a book and said in his abrupt way: “We do not put enough in;” meaning thereby, that we ignored too much of life in our fiction—excluded it out of regard for propriety. But when I met him, some years later, in Paris, he had changed his mind about that, for he detested the French naturalism, and could find nothing to praise in Zola.

Boyesen. I am going to ask you one of the interviewer’s stock questions, but you need not answer, you know: Which of your books do you regard as the greatest?

Howells. I have always taken the most