Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the church--and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and God disposes.
[Footnote 10: Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex." Little, Brown & Co., publishers.]
[Footnote 11: Beacon Biographies: S. F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge; Small, Maynard & Co.]
No single house in all Massachusetts has survived so many of the vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College, Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in 1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the vicinity.
To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss, for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.