 He had spoken to Grant and shaken hands with Meade at the Battle of Spotsylvania. He had seen Lincoln dodge enemy fire at Fort Stevens during Jubal Early's raid on Washington. As a boy, he knew Ralph Waldo Emerson as a family friend and dimly remembered Herman Melville, a summer neighbor, as a rather gruff, taciturn man. Traveling Europe after the war, he climbed the Alps with Leslie Stephen, better known to later generations as the father of Virginia Woolf.