Looking for Mr. Gilbert

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”

Judging from the rise of the manes of the two horses you would say that the carriage is moving at a fast clip. The heads are blurred and straining forward, the hooves unfocused, clip-clopping straight on; you can almost hear the regular chop of the hoofbeats and the creak of the carriage and smell oiled leather and horse. The driver of the phaeton is heavyset. He has a fulsome white walrus mustache with waxed points and is dressed formally in livery, with a shiny top hat. He sits upright, hands relaxed on the reins, but intent on his work. There is a large brass carriage lantern at his left, and the sweep of a whip rises up behind him, flowing backward like a thin spray of water and adding to the overall sense of speed. It is a fine day besides, late morning, by the shadows beneath the carriage. Also June. This much I know because someone scratched the day, year, and place on the side of the glass plate negative in a small scrolling hand that looks a lot like Gilbert’s: “Cambridge, June 18th, 1897.”

The house behind the phaeton is a clapboard Georgian structure, shuttered in the upper windows, with diamond-patterned windows on the first floor. Huge elm trees obscure the place, and there is a clean, plain, white picket fence in front of the yard and a sidewalk with well-cut granite curbs. The street is still unpaved, and if you look carefully you can see that other carriages have passed that day, which means that the weather has been dry for a while.

I recognize this place, even though it’s not identified on the plate. It is 145 Brattle Street, William Brewster’s boyhood home, and the site of his famous bird museum and his (some would say) infamous, or at least eccentric, yard. Over the years, after he inherited the house, he planted many native trees and shrubs on the two-acre plot and then surrounded the whole with a twelve-foot wire-mesh fence—not to keep out human intruders, mind you, but to hold at bay his archenemies in Cambridge: cats. William Brewster was not fond of cats.

Number 145 Brattle Street is now owned by the Armenian Apostolic Church, and although the interior has been altered, the exterior remains the same; you can even shade yourself under some of the trees planted by William Brewster. The house is one of the old grand mansions on the so-called Tory Row in Cambridge. Many of the larger houses here were built by successful merchants who fled the country when rumors of revolt began in the mid-eighteenth century. Two doors east, toward Harvard Square, is the Craigie Mansion, the former home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a house also famous for the fact that George Washington lived here during the Boston campaign in 1775.

Although descended from William Brewster, the first minister at Plymouth Plantation, the Brewster family moved north to Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in the third generation and lived there until the early nineteenth century, when the current William Brewster’s father came south toward Boston. William the younger was born in Wakefield, in 1851, but the family soon moved to the big house on Brattle Street, where he grew up. Will, as he was known in his younger years, expressed an early interest in birds and used to go out every Saturday on egg-collecting and nest-collecting forays with his friends, one of the favorite pastimes of country boys in those years. Cambridge was essentially rural at the time. There were fields running down to the Charles River in this section of the town; there was an orchard behind Brewster’s house, and there were pastures, a large vegetable garden, a plot of berry bushes, and a horse barn closer to the house.

Whoever made the photograph that day must have been preparing to take a picture of the house and had seen the phaeton coming. He inserted the glass plate, quickly focused on the house, and then waited.

The horses’ heads entered the ground glass image. He waited.

They reached the east side of the dark porch; he waited, then squeezed the shutter bulb.

The heads of the horses are stopped just beyond the door, the carriage obscures the lower windows, the leaves of the trees no longer flutter, the arching carriage whip freezes in a spraylike curve, and, could we see inside the parlor, the hands of Caroline Brewster perhaps halt, mid bar, on the keyboard as the phaeton chops by.

There is no other traffic that day, no automobiles as yet on Brattle Street, even though there are automobiles elsewhere. In fact, the nearby town of Newton was well known for the manufacture of the new vehicles. All of these were private firms, operating out of carriage houses in back of the main houses by mechanically inclined tinkerers. The new machines, or “bubbles,” as they were called, were popular with a certain class of rich, although not with Brewster. He would not deign to be so vainglorious. Mr. Brewster, although a bit of an outsider by choice, maintained the old Brahmin traditions of frugality. Why buy anything new when what you already owned was good enough for your grandparents. In Mr. Brewster’s case, this thriftiness did not extend to cameras, but then cameras were an exception, even fashionable, among the Brahmins. Oliver Wendell Holmes himself—a neighbor of the Brewster family and the man who invented the term “Boston Brahmin”—owned one and even wrote essays on photography for the Atlantic Monthly.

Mr. Gilbert observed closely the behavior of the Brahmin class around him. He watched the studious attention to detail practiced by his employer, Mr. Brewster. He taught himself to type. He learned to develop and print the photographs taken by Brewster. He learned how to set up the camera. Then he learned how to take the pictures. By this time, he had also learned to play the piano well enough to teach young people and I suspect he halted at the living room door whenever he passed through the hallways of 145 Brattle when Caroline was at the piano. And I suspect that she noticed this. And I think she invited him to listen. And then, after he let it slip that he knew something of the keyboard, suggested that he sit, and that he run through a chord sequence and play a few melodies. Which he did, with consummate and surprising skill, playing in the classical style, his long fingers fluttering easily through the phrases. In certain quiet moments when he and Caroline were alone and Brewster was out tinkering in his bird museum, the two of them talked about music. William had no particular patience for music and Caroline perhaps enjoyed having someone around the house who appreciated her piano abilities. And in this manner, little by little, through shared interest, I believe that these two became fast friends. I say this because later, when Gilbert was hard-pressed financially because of family illnesses, it was Caroline who approached her husband to ask if he could not lend Mr. Gilbert some funds. He did, “… but I do not know when I shall be repaid,” he confided to his diary, in an uncharacteristic personal aside.

Caroline was given to illnesses, was fond of dogs, music, reading. She was a full-bosomed woman with noticeable blue eyes, a sweep of auburn hair, and was close with a certain friend, identified in Brewster’s diaries as ERS, which was code for Elizabeth R. Simmons. Caroline and ERS, not unlike William and Mr. Gilbert, were together often. They visited each other’s houses regularly, and Caroline would periodically spend the night at the house of ERS, who was unmarried and lived alone. They went to the theater and to dinner. They traveled abroad together, sometimes starting out with William in tow, sometimes meeting up with him later, usually in England, although on several occasions on the Continent, where they traveled through Belgium and France. Periodically William and Caroline, accompanied by ERS and Gilbert, would voyage by train northward to Bethel, Maine, the jumping-off point for the then wilderness fastness of Lake Umbagog. In Bethel, they would visit an apparent family friend named “Doctor G”—code, I later learned, for Dr. John Gehring, a popular neurastheniologist of the period, who treated both Caroline and William.

This relationship between ERS and Caroline, which, in the common parlance of the era, came to be known as a “Boston marriage,” was a curious phenomenon of the period, outlined most completely in Henry James’ contemporary novel The Bostonians. The best known of these marriages, and the possible model for James’ book, was the relationship between the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, the wife of the famous editor James T. Fields. The two friends, Jewett and Fields, were drawn together after the death of James Fields, and their relationship rapidly evolved into a long-term union of intense mutual affection. They were a recognized and accepted couple within Boston literary social circles.

Although the apparently lesbian involvement of the Boston marriage would be taken for granted in our time, in fact the sexual nature of these relationships has been the subject of continued discussion. Social historians—never a group normally known to shrink from controversy—have tended to deal more with the emotional needs of these unions, rather than sex. If nothing else, the marriage may have been a “romantic friendship,” a relationship that is rare nowadays, closer to a sisterly or spiritual communion between two individuals. In any case, the nuances of interrelationships in that polite age were usually merely hinted at in print, although they may have been more freely discussed over brandy and cigars in the exclusive all-male clubs of Boston.

Whatever went on between Miss Simmons and Mrs. William Brewster can only be implied from the frequent references to some of the outings that these two went on in Brewster’s diaries and journals. “ERS and C. to dinner,” for example, or “C spent the night with ERS, returned with ‘Larry’ the next morning.” (Larry was the Brewsters’ beloved springer spaniel, a dog later replaced by an Irish terrier named Timmy, whom William and Caroline loved as they would a child.) William Brewster did not seem to resent in anyway the “marriage” of these two. In fact he seems to have had a genuine fondness for ERS as well as a solicitous, caring relationship with Caroline. The three of them often dined together and would always join one another on holidays. From time to time in the diaries and journals, Brewster lets slip a little aside that opens a slight crack in the secret door of his relationship with Caroline, however: “Another long, sad talk with C this morning …,” he wrote at one point, or in another entry, “C feels she is unable to maintain the household any longer.…”

Generally, Brewster’s diaries and journals concern the birds he had seen, and other natural history notes, along with a few details on his property management. He had constant problems with the Irish workers at October Farm, some of whom, on certain occasions, become surly, and some of whom he had to fire. His struggles over these decisions are hinted at. And so too is the involvement of his great ally in this ongoing struggle with the Irish workers, his factotum, Gilbert. Nowhere in these writings, however, are there any significant asides about ERS, save for his concern about her when she was sick—probably with pneumonia. She is referred to almost every day in this period, a thorough record of her convalescence. Furthermore, when Caroline was sick and in the hospital—this troop was often ill, it appears—Brewster spent a great deal of his time with ERS. It was one big happy family, with dogs supplanting children, ERS as sister, maiden aunty, or sometime husband, and Gilbert as some rare species of helpful younger sibling who was willing to do anything requested of him.

Married women of the Victorian era, generally speaking, were prisoners of the hearth. The Brahmin gentleman, unless he was a rebel (of whom there were a few in this group), always married a woman of his class. She was to manage the household and oversee the nurturing of the children (although she was not required to change their diapers, or put them to bed, or play horsy with them—that was Nursey’s job). By day, she was permitted to go to her sewing circle and she was permitted to go to the Friday afternoon symphony, and to hold teas and even go on outings in the field. She was, however, expected to be home at night. Meanwhile the man, the hunter, was out in the wilderness of the banks and the clubs and the committee meetings. Elsewhere, in more degenerate American cities than Boston, he might even descend to the ninth circle of the brothels and the gambling houses. Young Bostonian males were repeatedly warned against such practices, however, and Harvard men were not to be seen (not supposed to be seen, at least) in the squalid West End, among the foreign element, where there were loose women and questionable card games. Nor were the students supposed to frequent the bars and taverns of Scolley Square, where sailors and prostitutes were known to congregate. They did anyway, of course. But it is difficult for me to imagine Mr. Brewster and his company of nature-loving companions slumming in the squalor of the West End on hot summer nights, or downing whiskeys with the whores of Scolley Square.

Given these social conditions, it is curious to note that in most of the photos of people taken by Brewster or Gilbert the separation of sexes is not apparent. Out in the wilds of the North Woods, there are women present. They are there in the lean-to hunting lodges, dressed in their heavy woolen riding skirts and straw hats; they are out in the forest with rough-bearded local guides, dressed in summer whites and backed by a tangle of the foreboding dark trees. You see women seated primly in the sterns of the handsome Adirondack-style pulling boats that Brewster and Gilbert rowed around on Lake Umbagog, in Maine. You see them along the banks of the more civil Concord River, in all their feather-bonneted finery. And of course you see them in the gardens of Cambridge, and in the pastures of Concord and on the porches of the summer houses in Lancaster, and in Dublin, New Hampshire, where they would retreat during the hot weeks of the Boston summer. My sense is that Brewster’s group was atypical. Although he counted many Harvard professors in his circle, as opposed to paunchy clubmen and financiers, and even though he was friends with a few of the socially accepted Boston Ten painters, Frank Benson and Abbott Thayer, for example, and counted Daniel Chester French as one of his longest and deepest friends, he was not necessarily literary, or professorial, or artistic.

Brewster, ERS, Caroline, and their company of friends seem to have been able to mix with everyone to a certain degree. They were in some ways a unique species, endemic perhaps to Cambridge. Their sacred texts were Emerson and Thoreau, and they entertained one another with private dinners, traveled much, read Dickens by night to each other, and went out to the parks of the Emerald Necklace at dawn to look for songbirds. Brewster’s “colored friend” (as he is often designated in contemporary diaries and articles about William Brewster), Mr. Robert A. Gilbert, went with them. As my earliest informant, the research librarian from Harvard, suggested, Gilbert appears to have been a favorite of the Brahmins, a pet, what we might now call their token Negro. But he was, withal, under the employ of Mr. William Brewster, and although he seems to have come and gone on his own, without scheduled hours, interweaving Brewster’s world with his own private affairs and his family, he was, in the end, a paid employee.

One evening at one of his favorite Cambridge watering holes, I told my guide, Tremont Williams, the long story of the relationship between Gilbert, Caroline Brewster, and her apparent Boston marriage with ERS. I could see his mind working before I even finished.

“What do you think?” I asked, once I had outlined the picture.

“What do you think?” he countered. “Pretty obvious.”

“No it isn’t and you know it. This is no ménage à trois if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“How about a ménage à quatre?” he asked, winking.

“Forget it,” I said. “This is cold roast Boston.”

But as the evening wore on the possibilities continued to grow in his mind and by way of entertainment he began to outline a novel.

“Caroline and William have a sexless marriage, tied together by a mutual love for dogs,” he began. “In comes Mr. Gilbert. Young. Twenty-seven, did you say when he first starts working for Brewster? He meets Caroline. Smooth white skin, coppery hair, ten years older, but well preserved. Plays the piano beautifully. Loves flowers. Dogs everywhere. Gilbert loves dogs too. Remembers them from his youth. The two of them talk. They find they have a lot in common in spite of the social and racial chasm between them. He plays the piano. She’s sympathetic, is moved by his skill. More talk. These Brahmins loved their ‘Negroes,’ I can tell you that much. In the meantime, Brewster finds in Gilbert everything he lacks in himself, including a competency with machines, the craftsman’s skill, a good companion, an excellent field observer. Brewster’s got bad eyesight, no?”

“In his youth, yes.”

“Gilbert is his bird spotter, begins to supply all the material for his field notes. Soon he begins to write up the notes in Brewster’s hand. Then he commences to write the articles that Brewster is publishing. He’s his secretary, his valet, his chauffeur, his gentleman’s gentleman. Doltish Brewster plods on. His success increases, and it’s all because of Gilbert. This is all more or less true, isn’t it?”

“To an extent, yes,” I said. “But very exaggerated. I see where you’re going and it is totally outrageous.”

“No, there’s more. Who’s this picky fellow at the museum you told me about?”

“Samuel Henshaw?”

“Right. Henshaw. One day, after hours at the museum Henshaw catches Gilbert doctoring Brewster’s notes. He pretends not to notice. Begins snooping. Builds a case.”

“And?”

“I’m thinking …”

He downed the last of his whiskey and looked off for the waiter.

“Did you say Gilbert made money in the shoe polish business? Went to Paris?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t fit. The timing is wrong.”

“When did Henshaw die?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Long after Brewster though, the early thirties, I think. He stayed on at the museum until he was seventy-five, never took a day’s vacation in thirty or more years.”

“Gilbert couldn’t have, you know, eased him out through intrigue?”

“No. But then shortly after Brewster died, Gilbert began working full-time at the museum. Not long after that the museum finally got rid of Henshaw.”

“Plot thickens,” he said.

“To what, though? No case, Tre. No story.”

“There is a story. There’s got to be. There’s always a story. You just have to know how to find it. How about an affair between Caroline and Mr. Gilbert?”

“Never!” I said loudly, feigning indignation. “Never on this earth. Gilbert was a family man and a churchgoer. An upright citizen.”

Tre rolled his eyes.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

“Caroline, much as she may have loved Gilbert as a friend, would be horrified at anything physical. Would faint outright even at the suggestion. She was sensitive, a hothouse flower,” I said.

“How do you know?” Tre asked.

“I just know. I know them. I know a little about the period.”

“We don’t know anything,” he said, leaning forward and looking at me directly—which was rare for him. “We don’t even know what we are supposed to know. You don’t even know who really took all those old photos you cart around.”

There was, as there is in all fictions, a certain amount of truth to his drunken ramblings. And he was spot on about one thing. We really only know the externalities.

By this time in the quest to find Mr. Gilbert, whenever I had the chance, following the suggestions of Mr. Tremont Williams, I would run off to various libraries and search through federal records and the like, tracking down leads wherever they appeared. But I realized I would never find the man at the rate I was moving. Facing this reality, I managed to obtain some funding through a series of generous grants from organizations that were apparently intrigued by the fact that I may have discovered one of the few African American photographers to have engaged in landscape photography. Using the funds, I was able to hire a research assistant named Jill Brown to help chase down some of the intriguing clues I was finding concerning Mr. Gilbert’s ventures.

Ms. Brown was an indefatigable researcher who had worked mainly in the field of art history and whose credentials included an award from Harvard University named for the African American painter Allan Crite, who is best known for his stylized scenes of black life in the Boston neighborhoods in the 1930s. If not an outright associate, he would have been known, at the very least, to Mr. Gilbert.

Jill Brown and I began following the leads for Gilbert and Brewster beyond the confines of Cambridge and Concord. One of these excursions took us to the town of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, the family home of William’s line of Brewsters. Caroline and William, usually accompanied by Gilbert, would often visit the area to attend to family matters and dedications and social events that required their presence.

There is a well-endowed private school on the lakeshore, a collection of neoclassical buildings set on a rise, with rolling lawns that drop down to the banks from the east. The school was founded (resuscitated from an early institution, actually) by William’s father, John Brewster. The institution was defunct in the 1830s, but old John Brewster, the elder, bailed it out on condition that the name be changed to Brewster Academy and that the school accept anyone, regardless of age, sex, and—interestingly enough—race. It was an early statement of the aborning New England fight for Negro equality.

John Brewster was a local farm boy with an eye to success. He worked first in a local dry-goods shop, and having tasted the possibility of more lucrative ventures, moved to Boston and, with his savings and a few loans, started his own business. After a few wise investments, coupled with good timing, he prospered, and by the time his only child, William, was born, in 1851, he had established a banking firm that, within a decade, was averaging half a million dollars a week. When he died, in 1886, he was a millionaire and left his son in good standing. Old John never forgot his country roots, though. He came back to Wolfeboro every summer and was more than generous to the town in his will.

Wolfeboro, which advertises itself as America’s oldest summer resort, is now one of those small-town New England summer colonies whose population swells each season and declines every winter. There’s a main street lined with generally useless shops and the usual assortment of small restaurants, historical sites, museums, and the main attraction, the wide lake. In fact the town is not that much different from how it was in the 1890s, when Wolfeboro was at its height as a summer retreat. Old photos of street scenes taken back then show crowds of revelers out on the main thoroughfare, pushing their bicycles and baby carriages, dressed in their straw hats and long skirts, and wandering the shops, scouting for tourist trinkets.

We first arrived in town on a hot July day, and set out to hunt the local libraries and town archives. John Brewster’s magnanimity was everywhere evident: Brewster Academy, Brewster Beach, Brewster Street, Brewster this and Brewster that, all over the town. But no Gilbert. No trace anywhere except perhaps in a local oddball natural history museum in the town, established by a turn-of-the-century dentist named Doctor Libby, who was a contemporary of William Brewster and was an eclectic and energetic collector of artifacts. Along with cases displaying the dried, brown hands of Egyptian mummies, long curling Chinese fingernails, hideous nineteenth-century dental tools, one of Henry Thoreau’s pencils, mouse skeletons, and cases of stuffed endemic mammals of the region, you will find there row upon row of bird skins, some of which were collected by Brewster and may have been stuffed for the museum by Robert Gilbert.

Shooting and stuffing the bodies of local birds as a means of maintaining records of the resident and migratory species of birds was the standard method of study in the nineteenth century, and both Brewster and Gilbert were skilled at taxidermy. You can find sorted and displayed skins probably prepared by Gilbert, but credited to William Brewster, in little natural history museums all over New England, everywhere from the Berkshires to the Harvard Museum of Natural History (the new name for Mr. Brewster’s Museum of Comparative Zoology).

It was beastly hot that day and, rather than continue, we deserted our quest early and wandered down to an old dock opposite the museum, jumped in the lake, and swam out and drifted there for a while, cooling off. After our swim, we went for a drink at a local pub that had a terrace facing the lake, hoping to catch a breeze. While we were there we spotted a poster indicating that the Preservation Hall Jazz Band was to perform that night at (where else?) the Brewster Performance Tent and I suggested that we attend.

“We shouldn’t go to this event now,” Ms. Brown said. “Mr. Gilbert wouldn’t like it.”

This gave me pause. It is true that neither William, nor Caroline, nor Mr. Gilbert liked jazz. The closest the Brewsters ever came to letting loose were the Virginia reels they sometimes held in the front halls—Caroline at the piano, with the formal lines of high-buttoned Brahmins tramping up and down in stiff processions.

“This is our research,” I said. “We have to understand what he so hated.”

Mr. Gilbert might have hated the music that night. But he would not have minded the audience. Here on this summer night there were only two black couples and they were cut in Mr. Gilbert’s style, formal banker-type families up from Boston or Washington. Everyone else was white—and white-haired to boot—and dressed for the night in their finest L.L.Bean summer casuals.

The lead singer for the band was a Louis Armstrong look-alike with a gravelly voice who played a mean trumpet and was soon stomping and swinging through all the old numbers. The band tried its best to roust the New Englanders, but they just sat there and clapped weakly after each number, and there wasn’t any shouting or jumping and nobody chopping the floor with their arms flinging akimbo in the Charleston, as there would have been back in the old days when the Charleston was in vogue and the Jazz Age was in full swing in America. Sensing this, the band worked harder, and the harder they worked, the more the old folks dug in, clapping politely, sometimes even enthusiastically at the familiar numbers, but no hooting or hollering. They sat, upright in their uncomfortable wooden chairs as if still bound in whalebone corsets, high-button collars, and starched boiled shirts of the late nineteenth century.

Finally the band took a break and disappeared backstage. There was a bar in the back of the tent and the polite Yankees lined up for their bottled spring water, Coke, and ginger ale in spite of the fact that champagne was being served as well.

“Let’s have a toast,” I said to Ms. Brown. “Let’s drink to Old Mr. Gilbert and let the night be damned.”

We had a couple of glasses, then another, and then the band picked up again.

It was a still night beyond the tent, a hot night; the lawns of Brewster Academy swept down to the dark shores of the lake, and above us the stars were sharp and the lights of the summer cottages were winking across the waters and a warm breeze was coming in, smelling of lake, rank vegetation, and ancient earth.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said, and we stood outside the lightened tent for a while, watching the performance from afar. One of the hot, jumping numbers ended. There was the usual round of polite applause, and then, quietly, the piano man struck a few introductory notes, ran through a sequence, and the banjo player stood up and took the mike.

We did not see it coming at first. He started to sing quietly, a warm honey-smooth voice, just the way Mr. Gilbert would have liked to hear it:

“Just a closer walk with thee…”

We didn’t see it coming.

“Grant it, Jesus, is my plea …”

Trumpet moved in, thickly fluid, like wild honey.

“… daily walking close to thee …,” he sang, “Let it be, dear Lord, just let it be …”

“Come on,” I said, “let’s dance.”

She glanced heavenward. “Mr. Gilbert, forgive us,” she said.

I gathered her up and we spun off slowly, the trumpet winding through, the clarinet player leaning into the music.

“—Guide me safely, gently o’er …,” the banjo man sang.

A riff from the clarinet …

“—to Thy kingdom shore, to thy shore.”

An easy, slow statement from the trumpet, like an afterthought.

“Dear Lord, let it be.”

And then before the last note faded, the trumpet cut in again and then the drum smacked and suddenly the whole band broke into a snarly jump and the players were all over the stage, dipping and bowing, and even the old New Englanders worked into it little by little, some began clapping rhythmically, then one or two got up and started to dance and then a few more, then they spilled out onto the lawns, and soon they’re all over the place, skinny old geezers in narrow L.L.Bean trousers, throwing their arms every which way, clapping and swinging their lowered heads from side to side in replication of what they believe to be the style of those few Negroes whom they may have seen from time to time, and some of the old ladies in print shirtwaists back in the tent, swaying, and swinging their hips like sluts and singing along with their eyes shut tight, arms outspread, snapping their fingers and the lights seem to brighten, the music grows faster and louder.

We looked back at the tent and the whole white space seemed on fire, a brightly lit vision of feet and arms and undulating bodies, and then, abruptly, just before the music got too frenzied and the older ones started dropping from coronaries, it ended.

The crowd surged toward the stage, band members took their bows, holding up their instruments and thanking each other, extending their arms to one another to give credit where credit was due, the singer, the piano man, the clarinet, the trumpet, drums and bass.

“What was that all about?” I said once the applause had died down.

After that the group played a few of the old popular chestnuts, and then, at the end of the concert, tried to get a conga line going and broke into “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and most of the old-timers got up again and grasped onto each other by the hips and more or less walked in a shuffling line around the hall without much spirit, as if spent, or perhaps embarrassed, by their earlier expression of feeling.