PROFESSOR: What message do people generally send back when you first call on them?

OLD AGE: Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call; get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six, — sometimes ten years or more. At last, if they don’t let me in, I break in through the front door or the windows.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) American poet, essayist, scholar

“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” Atlantic Monthly (1858-05)
    (Source)

Collected in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, ch. 7 (1858).