Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/26

 18 in which he lived so long he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the 'Miseries of Old Age' at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word, carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of the Bryn Mawr College library—it was on the hottest of June days, and he was sweltering under the crimson trappings and beef-eater hat of his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a consoling word to him. He replied, 'Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir pour être swell.'

The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip abroad after his graduation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard Burton, imperious-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his consular court; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study, of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man