[Boston—Monday, 18 April 1870]
Monday April 18. Mr. Longfellow came to dine again this week with Profr Greene. Mabel was here also. Longfellow talked a great deal. He said he sent all his early pieces to a Cambridge editor whose only payment was sending the newspaper he edited for three years. Afterward he sent his poems to Little & Brown who presented him the volume in which they appeared with others as compensation.
Emma Holland is visiting here. I went & took Bessie Andrew to the French Play Saturday night. It was brilliant, vivacious, perfect but unhappily much immorality was talked of and displayed in it as a mere matter of fact which I found yesterday at Sunday School had made the dear Putnams etc. quite miserable. Mais—que faire? Fechter is not perfect, we could see that alas, only too clearly—but how far wrong only One must judge. How then can he be a friend of Charles Dickens? said B.G.
Bessie Greene came to dine one day.