Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/21

 acknowledgment to his father in one of his volumes. Even a year from eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his weekly visit from his country home like 'a royal, good, and gallant ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.'

There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year. He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine, in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center, stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flashing sheer personality, and with a big silver ear-trumpet moving here and there, into which some one at his side poured a reversion of the passing talk, who is there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it? None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best recipe and assurance of unflagging talk, of explosive, masculine laughter, of