Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of us does not envy him the memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancée; Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall, Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality! What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and Sisters," as this group of young people was called.
[Illustration: OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.]
Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later assembled in this same room--Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits--seldom being seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the _Harvard Graduates Magazine_ (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent number of the _Radcliffe Magazine_, many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.