In his devotion to the ideals of Williams as he saw them, Dr. Nelson was, many have said, more distinguished by manly but quiet zeal than any other graduate of his prominence in public life. He stood for scholarship, fine scholarship of course, but even above that he put honor, a gentleman's code of honor. He was unconditional in his contempt for hedging, for trickery, for meanness. Constantly he showed himself an idealist, as in his advocacy of an absolute honor system. But in all there was the play of a shrewd wit, the touch of sureness, lacking snobbery, of the man who knows where he stands, and a love of entertaining others. For only six years we knew him as a teacher, but the time was long enough for many of his ideals and ideas to take root, and the fruit of them will long be apparent.



VII. HARRY PRATT JUDSON

GEORGE EDWIN MACLEAN '71

Harry Judson entered Williams from Stillwater, New York, and it was said that he made the best entrance examinations ever passed up to that time. Immediately upon his graduation, the third in his class, in 1870, he taught public school in Troy, and was initiated as a reformer in municipal politics when Troy was infamous for corruption.

The second public era of his life, 1885 to 1892, witnessed his introduction to the West as professor of history in the University of Minnesota. This was the time of the refounding of that institution under the beginning of President Northrop's administration, to whom Professor Judson became a right hand. His career is an illustrious example of one rising slowly and patiently through every grade of the public school system, to its crown in the highest grades in the state university. It must have been of inestimable worth to him to become familiar with the genius of a state university, so peculiarly a people's institution and so characteristic of the middle West.

Unconsciously he was preparing for crowning his career in the new University of Chicago. It is not strange that, in 1889, three years before he became a member of the university's first faculty, President Harper's attention was attracted to him, and he brought the early drafts of his plan for a herculean university to Professor Judson for criticism. When the inner history of that university is written, in my opinion, the world will be surprised to learn of the contribution of Professor Judson, who was Dr. Harper's Secretary of the Interior from the beginning. What Mr. Rockefeller was as a silent partner in money matters, Dr. Judson was in matters of the mind.

As dean of the Faculty of Arts, Literature, and Science from 1892 till his accession to the presidency, he was in admirable training for that office. His facility in using his knowledge, his versatility of powers, fired by an innate energy, regulated by steadiness of purpose, and aimed at the highest ideals, make his name synonymous with efficiency incarnate. His modesty equals his ability. Harper stands as an heroic figure, a Napoleon with visions of educational conquest, selected by the far-seeing Rockefeller to build a university in the center of the nation and to give the West intellectual self-respect. With the same keenness of vision Mr. Rockefeller and the trustees selected as Dr. Harper's successor a human figure, one in almost every way a contrast to Dr. Harper; an Elisha succeeding an Elijah and fitted to balance and round out the creative stage in a university to be not only the biggest but the best in the West. Williams as the mother of many educators must place the name of Judson beside that of Mark Hopkins.



VIII. CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL

SOLOMON BULKLEY GRIFFIN '72

Dr. Hall was born in 1852, and died within a short time of two of his best and best-known college friends, H.L. Nelson and Isaac Henderson, on March 15, 1908. On being graduated from Williams in 1872 and from the Union Seminary, his first pastorates were spent in Newburgh, N.Y., and in Brooklyn, whence he was called to the presidency of Union Seminary in 1897. The most brilliant of his achievements was perhaps embodied in his two trips to India as the Barrows lecturer of the University of Chicago;—he had a wonderful aptitude in applying the principles of Christianity to an alien civilization. A class-mate, the editor of the Springfield Republican is the author of the tribute to his memory which follows.

* * * * *

It is around the thought of Cuthbert Hall the college boy, rather than the distinguished president of a great seminary and all the rest, with the world so much his parish, that any word of loving memory shapes itself. He was refined and winning. If ever the sunlight of a gracious nature touched any youth, it rested on him; the unworthy and the trivial passed him by. His adjustment of values even then was mature and firm. His literary taste and product were superior. He was a natural gentleman, and that meant a Christian by all the call of his nature. Love of the fine, the high, the genuine, and the generous, was instinctive. His breadth of charity and welcome for knowledge in youth became the distinction of his manhood.

Qualities were conspicuous in his life that bound worldlings to him in a bond of fellowship that grappled the best that was in them. Goodness of his sort is commanding—the practical power of a pure life is a pulpit asset that reenforces the spoken word beyond all human calculation. Under his leadership Union Seminary could not have been other than liberal and sympathetic toward devout scholarship that might seem to threaten the ancient foundations of faith.

When a class-mate late in life found repose in the Roman church, Dr. Hall could see and say that such anchorage was best for his friend. All paths that led to trust in God and the strengthening of the essentials of character were allowable in the brotherhood of the service of humanity.

The world of scholarship has its arrogancies—sometimes it is critical over-much, intolerant toward the lesser requirements of busy men outside. This man never lost touch with men as they passed. His own assurance of belief was a flame which lighted many torches. It was a sane and a glad evangel that he gave to his students, and brought in almost constant and always ardent addresses to the youth of many colleges.

Intellectual integrity was joined in him with the finest spiritual apprehension and expression, so that he was qualified to carry a message to the cultivated of India, where he got his mortal hurt. In the knightly loyalty with which he labored his zeal was a highly tempered blade. He respected all faiths, but an abiding assurance of the supremacy of the service of Christ gave him unwavering serenity and poise. It is easy to think of Charles Cuthbert Hall entering the Supreme Presence reverently, unafraid, rejoicing, as naturally as a child would come home.



IX. BLISS PERRY

CARROLL LEWIS MAXCY '87

The subject of this brief sketch may indeed be termed a Williams man both by heredity and by environment. He passed his boyhood and early youth under the very shadow of our hills; and his father, Professor A.L. Perry, was for years the most widely known as well as the most generally loved of its faculty.

Bliss Perry was born in 1860; after graduation, in 1881, he became instructor in English and elocution at his alma mater and in 1886 was advanced to the full professorship. In 1893 he accepted a call to the same chair at Princeton. Six years later he was appointed to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, thus becoming one of a famous line of editors including Lowell, Howells, and Aldrich. He remained at the head of the Atlantic for just ten years, resigning in August 1909 to devote himself wholly to the duties of the chair of English literature at Harvard, which he had accepted two years before and which had already been filled by Longfellow and Lowell. The year 1909-1910 he spent abroad as Hyde lecturer at the Sorbonne.

Professor Perry's publications extend over the fields of fiction, criticism, and the occasional essay. His Study of Prose Fiction, a clear exposition of narrative writing, is one of the best-known college textbooks on the subject. His Walt Whitman is without doubt his most careful and elaborate critical work and is a recognized authority. The Amateur Spirit, a series of familiar essays, shows Professor Perry at his best and should be read especially by those who delight to study the personality of an author as revealed in his work.

But whatever fame Professor Perry may have attained in the fields of literature, to Williams men he is the teacher. In The Amateur Spirit he has written: "Your born teacher is as rare as a poet.... Once in a while a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving, the moment he shows power; or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year. But while he lasts—and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life—he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man; a man who taught him to think, or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon."

Those of us who have been under Professor Perry's instruction in the class-room must smile to note how—all unconsciously—he has here portrayed what we know him to be. Scholarly in his tastes, clear in his thinking, simple and direct in the expression of his thought, and always human in his personality, he "taught us to think, he helped us to feel, and he thrilled us with a new horizon." To us he seemed the ideal teacher, and as teacher and as man withal he has won the loyalty of Harvard, Princeton, and Williams men alike.



SUGGESTIONS

OVER THE HILLS

G.B.D.

"Mister," my companion in the smoking-car addressed me rather timidly, "hev you ever bin to Ebenezer?"

I looked at him a moment: kindly eyes, tanned face, grizzled beard; clothing of that indescribable, faded greenish brown which had lost all resemblance to its original color.

"Yes," I answered, "I've been there a number of times."

A moment's pause; then, "Quite a sizeable place, so folks say."

I assented, wondering what was to come.

"An' to think I've never seen it—never bin to Ebenezer in all my life, an' I live right back here a piece, not ten miles over the hills from Ebenezer. But if this here train stays on the track till we git there," he added with some pride, "I'm goin' to see it.

"I'm goin' to see Ebenezer, jest to think of it! Well sir, it makes me all het up. Many's the time when I come in fr'm chores, I'd set by the fire an' read the Ebenezer Weekly Review and Advertiser; an' there I'd see, 'Ebenezer items: Squire Hodge's store painted; the Ebenezer Dry Goods Emporium moved into new and more commodorious quarters,' et cetery. Then I'd say to Mandy, 'Mandy, some day we'll go to Ebenezer.' But we never went. Well, I s'pose it's all fer the best." He sighed and shook his head.

"But I'm goin' to see it all now." He brightened up again. "Yes, sir, poor Mandy's fixed so she can't leave the house now, kind of laid up with rheumatiz. A spell back, though, when our daughter got married, an' time kind o' hung heavy on our hands, Mandy says, 'Why don't you go alone, pa? Now's a good chance. So I fixed things up spick an' span, an' Nancy—that's our girl—come over this mornin' to stay with her ma, an' I—well, it'll be grand! D'you s'pose I c'n see it all in one day?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well," he sighed contentedly, "that's good. Say, you've bin awful good to me, tellin' me all about Ebenezer. I'm glad I met some one who's had experience in such a big town." Silence for a minute. Then he leaned over confidentially.

"D'y' know, it sort o' seems 's though the sunshine was a leetle bit brighter to-day than usual, all on 'count of my goin' to Ebenezer. Only I wish Mandy c'd be along."

"Ebenezer!" yelled the brakeman. "Ebenezer!"

Literary Monthly, 1906.



A NEW LIFE IN READING

J.O.S.E.

When we were at home the gas always went out at a certain time, and if we were tempted to finish just one more chapter of Coral Island or Out on the Pampas, we needs must steal a candle from the pantry stock and furtively read by its flickering light. Our own sense of danger, together with the imaginative effect wrought upon our excitive minds by the dancing candlelight and the awesome shadows of the still house, gave a strange relish to our childhood reading.

At boarding-school we found (among its other strange things) the electric light. At nine-thirty the bell in the chapel sounded taps, and all the lights in the school were extinguished simultaneously. Then the master would make his rounds and find the whole school evidently asleep in their beds. But presently doors would open and books would be read by the light in the hall. Still we had that same adventurous feeling in our readings, still that sweet taste of stolen fruit.

When we were graduated from the boarding-school, put away the proverbial childish things, and came to college, we were given a freedom such as we had never had before. No interfering master, no provoking lack of light to annoy us. We could burn our lamps all night, and receive no paternal rebuke or master's chastisement. And now, though there is none of that sweetness of stolen fruits, none of that creeping insecurity of former readings, there is an undisturbing, quiet secureness that makes our books more living to us. Now, when all the dormitory is asleep; when the lighted windowpanes have ceased to cast their gleams upon the snow; when the streets are deserted, the pool-rooms closed, and the last good-fellow has gone to bed, and only oneself is awake, then we have the full enjoyment of our quiet study lamp-light. We may yawn once or twice, a creak on the stair may startle us,—but we do not go to bed. We reach out our hand for some favorite volume, Stevenson's Garden of Verses, Underwoods, or Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: and read far on into the night towards cock-crow. We mingle our reading with dreams, and read on and on, finding a new feeling in our book: we find the author's deeper meaning. Our reading is undisturbed by the ghost-creep of childhood and the adventuresome daring of boarding-school. Formerly we had the mere tale or story; now we feel in a small degree the soul-expression of the writer—an indefinable, will-o'-the-wisp sort of thing; a something not always caught, but that strange intangible something which lends the spark of immortality to the master creations.

Literary Monthly, 1909.

THE END