Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[308] engineer and expert, and is a professor in the School of Mines at Columbia University. His book on “The Metallurgy of Steel” has won for him a high reputation. It will thus be seen that Mrs. Howe has had the rare and perhaps unequaled experience of being not merely herself an author, but the mother of five children, all authors. She has many grandchildren, and even a great-grandchild, whose future career can hardly be surmised.

There was held, in honor of Mrs. Howe's eighty-sixth birthday (May 27, 1905), a meeting of the Boston Authors' Club, including a little festival whose plan was taken from the annual Welsh festival of the Eistedfodd, at which every bard of that nation brought four lines of verse --a sort of four-leaved clover — to his chief. This being tried at short notice for Mrs. Howe, there came in some sixty poems, of which I select a few, almost at random, to make up the outcome of the festival, which last did not perhaps suffer from the extreme shortness of the notice:--