Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/25

 Rh friend, who sowed the strange and moving tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved, bringing him to Philadelphia and filling a month with mutual memories for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil of Richard Morris Hunt.

It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family dinner, a novel was written, the first chapter by Horace Howard Furness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a daughter in-law, no author to kill a character without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies as 'Grace Auchester.' I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence.

It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said, a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved through all the half century, the pink tights and the spangled skirt which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as Mlle. Furnessina. In the world of