United States. After a rough voyage, the steamer reached Boston on Friday, November 10, and six days later Thackeray arrived at the Clarendon Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, New York, replaced in 1910 by a lofty office building. An eager audience of about twelve hundred filled every seat in Dr. Bellows's church on Broadway, below Prince Street, when Thackeray gave his first lecture on the English humorists, his subject being Swift.

Five years later Thackeray met his old friend James E. Freeman, an American artist whom he had known in Rome, and said to him:

"Since I saw you last I have been lecturing in your vast and wonderful country, and my visits were well repaid. I was delighted with both nature and man in America, and I gained the first money that I have ever been able to put aside for the future. But I very much fear I shall not be able to repeat my visits with equal success, inasmuch as in one of my lectures I spoke of your immortal Washington

of Arthur Hallam, who inspired Tennyson's "In Memoriam." For many years Thackeray was Mrs. Brookfield's constant correspondent when absent from London. She died very suddenly of heart failure in 1901, and to the last was fond of speaking of "dear Thackeray," who sent her many letters written in the United States. Her only daughter married the elder bro

as Mr. Washington. Do you believe your countrymen will ever forgive me?"

Among women, Mrs. Jane Octavia Brookfield was Thackeray's dearest friend. She was the wife of the Rev. William Henry Brookfield, a Cambridge classmate and lifelong friend, and is believed to have suggested the character of Lady Castlewood in "Henry Esmond," who has been described as "perhaps the finest picture of splendid, lustrous physical beauty ever given to the world." Mrs. Brookfield, a portrait of whom accompanies this article, was a famous beauty and a cousin

ther of Sir Richmond Thackeray Ritchie, husband of Lady Ritchie. In his first letter from the Clarendon to Mrs. Brookfield, the delighted novelist, with slight exaggeration, stated that he was receiving for his lectures "almost a pound a minute!" From Buffalo, on December 29, 1852, Thackeray wrote to his mother, Mrs. Carmichael Smyth:

"If my health holds out I must go on money-grubbing for some months to come. They have paid me nearly 1600£ in 2 months of wh. I have spent 200 in travellingit is awfully dear work-next month will be another profitable month-afterwards in the South not so much profit but more pleasure for February & March-afterwards profit again & afterwards-Oh ye Gods, won't I be glad to come back leaving 500£ a year behind me [invested] in this country! Then grim death will not look so grim. Then the girls will have something to live upon or to bestow upon the objects of their young affectionsthen, when the house is paid for, we may live and take things easily-then, when I have written 2 more novels, for wh. I shall get 5000£ apiece-why then, at 50, I shall be as I was at 21. You will be only a young person of 69 then, and will