stream of two-and-two's wound through the apartments shaking hands with Old Abe and immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an hour and a half. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Abe is much better looking than I expected and younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow-working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord."

Melville struggled on for two more years at Pittsfield, and in October, 1863, moved with his family to 104 East 26th Street, New York, where he spent the remaining years of his life. His house in New York he bought from his brother Allan, giving $7,750 (covered by mortgages and in time paid for by legacies of his wife) and the Arrowhead place, valued at $3,000.

The last years in Pittsfield and the early years in New York were, in financial hardship, perhaps the darkest in Melville's life. He was in ill health, and except for the pittance from his books he was without income. His lectures were a desperate if not lucrative measure. But for the generosity of his wife's father, he would have been in destitution.

On December 5, 1866, he was appointed Inspector of Customs in New York-a post he held until January 1, 1886. He was sixty-seven years old when he resigned. His wife had come into an inheritance that allowed him an ultimate serenity in his closing years.

R. H. Stoddard, in his Recollections, thus speaks of Melville:

"My good friend Benedict sent me, one gloomy November forenoon, this curt announcement of a new appointment in Herman Melville: 'He seems a good fellow, Dick, and says he knows you, though perhaps he doesn't, but anyhow be kind to him if this infernal weather will let you be so to anybody.' I bowed to the gentleman who handed the note to me, in whom I recognised a famous writer whom I had met some twentyfive years before; no American writer was more widely known in the late forties and early fifties in his own country and in England than Melville, who in his earlier books, Typee, Omoo,

Mardi, and White Jacket, had made himself the prose poet of the strange islands and peoples of the South Seas.

"Whether any of Melville's readers understood the real drift of his mind, or whether he understood it himself, has often puzzled me. Next to Emerson he was the American mystic. He was more than that, however, he was one of our great unrecognised poets, as he manifested in his version of 'Sheridan's Ride,' which begins as all students of our serious war poetry ought to know: 'Shoe the steed with silver that bore him to the fray.' Melville's official duty during the last years of my Custom-House life confined him to the foot of Gansevoort Street, North River, and on a report that he might be changed to some district on the East River, he asked me to prevent the change, and Benedict said to me, 'He shan't be moved,' and he was not; and years later, on a second report of the same nature reaching him, I saw Benedict again, who declared with a profane expletive, 'He shall stay there.' And if he had not died about a dozen years ago he would probably be there today, at the foot of Gansevoort Street."

It is interesting that a man of the intellect of R. H. Stoddard should have found Melville's mind such a shadowed hieroglyph. With Stoddard so perplexed, it is less difficult to understand Melville's preference for solitude.

In his copy of Schopenhauer, Melville underlined the phrase -"this hellish society of men;" and he vigorously underscored the aphorism: "When two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them." Melville occupied himself with his books, with collecting etchings, with solitary walks; and for companionship he was satisfied with the society of his grandchildren. His grand-daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, thus records her recollections of such association:

"I was not yet ten years old when my grandfather died. To put aside all later impressions gathered from those who knew him longer and coloured by their personal reactions, all impressions made by subsequent reading of his books, results in a series of childish recollections, vivid homely scenes wherein

he formed a palpable background for my own interested activities.

"Setting forth on a bright spring afternoon for a trip to Central Park, the Mecca of most of our pilgrimages, he made a brave and striking figure as he walked erect, head thrown back, cane in hand, inconspicuously dressed in a dark blue suit and a soft black felt hat. For myself, I skipped gaily beside him, anticipating the long jogging ride in the horse cars, the goats and shanty-topped granite of the upper reaches of our journey, the broad walks of the park, where the joy of all existence was best expressed by running down the hills, head back, skirts flying in the wind. He would follow more slowly and call 'Look out, or the "cop" may catch you!' I always thought he used funny words: 'cop' was surely a jollier word than 'policeman.'

"We never came in from a trip of this kind, nor indeed from any walk, but we stopped in the front hall under a coloured engraving of the Bay of Naples, its still blue dotted with tiny white sails. He would point to them with his cane and say, 'See the little boats sailing hither and thither.' 'Hither and thither'-more funny words, thought I, at the same time a little awed by something far away in the tone of voice.

"I remember mornings when even sugar on the oatmeal was not enough to tempt me to finish the last mouthful. It would be spring in the back yard too, and a tin cup full of little stones picked out of the garden meant a penny from my grandmother. He would say in a warning whisper, 'Jack Smoke will come down the chimney and take what you leave!' That was another matter. The oatmeal was laughingly finished and the yard gained. Across the back parlour and main hall upstairs ran a narrow iron-trimmed porch, furnished with Windsor and folding canvas chairs. There he would sit with a pipe and his most constant c mpanion-his cane, and watch my busy activity below. Against the wall of the porch hung a match holder, more for ornament than utility, it seems. It was a gay red and blue china butterfly. Invariably he looked to see if it had flown away since we were there last.