In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into relations of intimacy only with one or two privat-docents, young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who, being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German, entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately. We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.

I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had deserted and cast off my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my "leaving them" an unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old manuscripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by "de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages." He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he survived it was as one of the unbekannt, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.

As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friendship.

Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy. "Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.

One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye gods, that that should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,—indeed was capable of such things himself.

It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia. Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the Nautical Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts. With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous aspect,—this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work:

To this work I was especially attracted, because its preparation seemed to me to embody the highest intellectual power to which man has ever attained. The matter used to present itself to my mind somewhat in this way.... There are tens of thousands of men who could be successful in all the ordinary walks of life. Thousands who could gain wealth, hundreds who could wield empires, for one who could take up the astronomical problems with any hope of success. The men who have done it are therefore in intellect the select few of the human race, an aristocracy ranking above all others in the scale of being. The astronomical ephemeris is the last practical outcome of their productive genius.

In pursuing their lives men no doubt follow the line of least resistance, and Simon Newcomb here we may be sure was no exception; thus he chose to deal in his work with the heaviest and most perplexing problems with which the human intellect can engage. I do not attempt to describe or estimate what he achieved. Only a few select minds in his generation were capable of that. At his death the tributes of those who had a right to speak were unmeasured. Perhaps no human mind ever attacked more boldly the uttermost difficulties, and indeed have been more successful in the wrestle. He was set by the side of Hipparchus, of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. In a class thus lofty, his scientific fellows have judged that he had a title to stand. In their high strivings he was equally zealous, and his achievement was comparable with theirs. Nevertheless, had his disposition inclined him, there were many other paths into which he might have struck with success. His versatility was marked and he did try his hand at various tasks, at finance, political economy, belles-lettres. James Bryce, who knew him well, is said to have seen in him the stuff for a great man-of-affairs, a leader of armies or a captain of industry. His excursions, however, into such fields, though sometimes noteworthy in result, were transient and more or less half-hearted. His allegiance, given so early to the sublimest of pursuits, held him to the end. The Government of the United States placed him in its highest scientific position, at the head of the Naval Observatory, and his serious work from first to last was in the solemn labyrinths where the stars cross and re-cross, and here he was one of the most masterful of master-minds.

It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever passed between us. I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner were simple, as of old. He was entitled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners.

It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.

On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists. He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity. While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps. All such he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.

Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its foundations in a re-shaping at the hands of new and brilliant men. Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas, the conservation and correlation of forces, the substitution of evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the ways of God to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.

What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat of a century ago. The beams were caught in the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light and heat day by day through many years was thus heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a time long past are making you comfortable in the wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite glows in your grate, you feel the veritable sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago upon the primeval world. It is the very light that was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled and drenched until at last they lay under the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held fast this treasure. When you scratch your match you but unlock the hoard, and the sunlight of primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and warms once more.

This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.

In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service. The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the odium theologicum. The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold, humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel. In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky.

A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz. He had come a few years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks, large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was pushing his investigations with passionate zeal. But the boys found in him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for who could tell what he might have in his pockets? Turtles, tadpoles, snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor's dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and hats of the household. Before the resulting consternation, masculine and feminine, he was always apologetic. He was on the friendliest terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not understand the qualms of the delicate. He was said to have held up once, in all innocence, before a class of school-girls a wriggling snake. The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had done. He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost running through his confusion. "Poor girls, I vill not do it again. Next time I vill bring in a nice, clean leetle feesh." Agassiz took no pleasure in shocking his class; on the contrary he was most anxious to engage and hold them. So too, if his audience was made up from people of the simplest. In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously as when addressing a company of savants. He always kindled as he spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those who listened. I have seen him stand before his class holding in his hand the claw of a crustacean. In his earnestness it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief. Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in his hand was a central link. His colour came and went, his eye danced and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable chain of being. With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented graphically the most intricate variations. He felt the sublimity of what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion of his fervour. I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the deep things of nature. He gloried in the exercise of his power, though hampered by poverty. "I have no time to make money," he cried. He sought no title but that of teacher. To do anything else was only to misuse his gift. In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so than in private talk. I recall walks we took with him to study natural objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected, bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been shaped by glaciers. He was charmingly affable, encouraging our questions, and unwearied in his demonstration. "Professor," I said once, "you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher in the vast series until at last we come to man. Why stop with man? why not conclude that as man surpasses what went before, so he in turn will be surpassed and supplanted by a being still superior;—and so on and on?" I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an afternoon ramble. He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.

Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. "Yes," was the bluff reply, "and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into a dormitory for my scientific students." They were quickly spoken, unmeditated words without intention of rudeness, but wrapped in his specialty he was rather careless as to what he might shoulder out. Again, we had in our company a delicate, nervous fellow who turned out to be a spiritualistic medium, and who was soon subjected to an investigation in which professors took part, which was certainly rough and ready. Agassiz speedily came to the conclusion that the young man was an impostor and deserved no mercy. Some of us felt that the determination was hasty. There was a possibility of honest self-deception; and then who could say that the mysteries had been fathomed that involved the play of the psychic forces? Possibly a calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation. At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research. These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of the world as to the method of creation, Agassiz stood almost solitary among authorities rejecting evolution and clinging to the doctrine of a special calling into being of each species. His stand against the new teaching was definite and bold, but can it be called broad-minded? This is but the limitation that makes human a greatness which the world regards with thorough and affectionate reverence. Fortunate are those in whose memories live the voice and countenance of Louis Agassiz.

Those whose privilege it was to know both father and son will be slow to admit that the elder Agassiz was the greater man. Alexander (to his intimates he was always, affectionately, Alex), was a teacher only transiently, and I believe never before a class showed the enkindling power which in the father was so marked a gift. His attainments, however, were probably not less great, and it remains to be seen whether his discoveries were not as epoch-making. He possessed, moreover, a versatility which his father never showed (perhaps because he never took time to show it), standing as a brilliant figure among financiers and captains of industry. Finally, in a high sense, Alexander was a philanthropist, and his benefactions were no more munificent than they were wisely applied; for he watched well his generous hand, guiding the flow into channels where it might most effectually revive and enrich. While possibly in the case of the elder Agassiz, the recognition of truth was sometimes unduly circumscribed, that could never be said of Alexander. He was eminently broad-minded, estimating with just candour whatever might be advanced in his own field, and outside of his field, entering with sympathetic interest into all that life might present.

I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in 1851. A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard students were to march in the procession. That day I first heard Fair Harvard, sonorously rendered by the band at the head of our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State House. A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to take his place in our class—a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years. His face had a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech. This he never lost, but it was no imperfection. Rather it gave distinction to his otherwise perfect English. In the years of our course, we met daily. He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the first for natural science and mathematics. He matured into handsome manhood, and as an athlete was among the best. He was a master of the oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the Charles. Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and lasting mark. The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Agassiz was sent up into the city to find some proper head-gear. He presently returned with a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that crimson became the Harvard colour.

Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose he worked I need not here detail. The story of the Calumet and Hecla Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics of American business life may read with pleasure. At the same time Agassiz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay. His voyages in the interest of science were many and long. He studied not so much the shores as the sea itself. Oceanographer is the term perhaps by which he may best be designated. By deep sea soundings he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses. Sitting next him at a class dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of the thing. He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas. His ideas were subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before Darwin died. They are now well-known and I think accepted, though unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order. They are revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that enter largely into the crust of the earth. In this field he stood as originator and chief. He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed, as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet lights.

Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the most various branches of natural science. At another class dinner, when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the roof of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy the trees of Cambridge, the masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree. Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel of animated nature. Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the zooephyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from the azoic rock on which it hangs.

As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man, then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it clings.

My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science, and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That day, he said, he had visited the site of his father's hut on the Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the glacial theory. On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up in a basket on the back of a guide. He had not been there since until that day. He was that night in the environment into which he had been born, and assumed toward me the attitude of a host making at home a stranger guest. To my question as to how a transient passer like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier. You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning. I had enjoyed a great privilege, for he was the man of all men to meet in such a place,—a feeling deepened a day or two later, when I looked down from the peak he had indicated upon this wide-stretching glacier below.

As age drew on he mellowed well. Perhaps sympathy with men and things outside his special walk was no stronger than in earlier years, but it had readier expression. I heard from him this good story. President Eliot was once showing about the university a multimillionaire and his wife who had the good purpose to endow a great school of learning in the West. Having made the survey, they stood in Memorial Hall, about to say good-bye. "Well, Mr. Eliot," said the wife, "How much money have you invested?" Mr. Eliot stated to her the estimated value of the university assets. The lady turning to her husband, exclaimed, with a touch of the feeling that money will buy everything, "Oh, husband, we can do better than that." Said Mr. Eliot, with a wave of the hand toward the ancient portraits on the walls: "Madame, we have one thing which money cannot buy,—nearly three centuries of devotedness!" There is fine appreciation of a precious possession in this remark. In other ways Harvard may be surpassed. Other institutions may easily have more money, more students. As able men may be in other faculties possibly (I will admit even this) there may be elsewhere better football. But that through eight generations there has been in the hearts of the best men, a constant all-absorbing devotion to the institution, is a thing for America unique, and which cannot be taken away. How stimulating is this to a noble loyalty in these later generations! The old college is a thing to be watchfully and tenderly shielded. As Alexander told me the story, I felt in his manner and intonation that the three centuries of devotedness had had great influence with him. As John Harvard had been the first of the liberal givers, so he was the last, and I suppose the greatest. The money value of his gifts is very large, but who will put a value upon the labour, the watchfulness, the expert guidance exercised by such a man, unrequited and almost without intermission throughout a long life! His fine nature, no doubt, prompted the consecration, but the old devotedness spurred him to emulation of those who had gone before.

In 1909 I enjoyed through Agassiz a great pleasure. He invited me to his house where I found gathered a company of his friends, many of them men of eminence. He had just returned from his journey in East Africa, during which he had penetrated far into the interior, studying with his usual diligence the natural history of the regions. He entertained us with an informal talk beautifully and profusely illustrated by photographs. I have said that he did not possess, or at any rate, never showed his father's power of kindling speech. So far as I know he never addressed large popular audiences. Nevertheless to a circle of scientific specialists, or people intelligent in a general way, he could present a subject charmingly, in clear, calm, fluent speech. On this occasion he was at his best, and it was a pleasure indeed to have the marvels of that freshly-opened land described to us by the man who of all men perhaps was best able to cope with the story. I listened with delight and awe. He was an old man crowned with the highest distinctions. I thought of the young handsome boy I had seen coming down in his grey suit into the Beacon Street mall, while the band played Fair Harvard. On the threshold I shook his hand and looked into his dark, kindly eyes. I turned away in the darkness and saw him no more.



CHAPTER X

AT HAPHAZARD

In 1887, in pleasant June weather I left St. Louis with my family on the capacious river-packet Saint Paul, for a trip up-stream to the city for which the boat was named. The flood was at the full as we ploughed on, stopping at landings on either side, the reaches between presenting long perspectives of summer beauty. We paused in due course at a little Iowa town, and among the passengers who took the boat here were two men who excited our attention at the landing. One was a tall handsome fellow in early manhood, well-dressed and mannered, completely blind. The other was his companion, a rather dishevelled figure with neglected beard and hair setting off a face that looked out somewhat helplessly into a world strange to it, an attire of loose white wool, plainly made by some tailor who knew nothing of recent fashion-plates. A close-fitting cap of the same material surmounted his head. The attire was whole and neat, but the air of the man was slouchy and bespoke one who must have lately come from the outskirts into the life of America. The young blindman at once aroused earnest sympathy. Of the other some one remarked, "Plainly a globe-trotting Englishman, who has lost his Baedeker and by chance got in here."

Presently the boat was on its way, and as I sat facing the changing scene, I heard a shuffling, hesitating step behind, and a drawling somewhat uncertain voice asked me about the country. I replied that it was my first trip and I was ignorant. Turning full upon the querist, no other than the globe-trotter, I said: "You are an Englishman I see. I was in England last year. I have spent some time in London, and I know other parts of your country." A conversation followed which soon became to me interesting. My companion had education and intelligence, and before the afternoon ended we were agreeably in touch. He handed me his card on which was engraved the name, "Mr. William Grey." I told him I was a Harvard man, a professor in Washington University, St. Louis. He was of Exeter College, Oxford, and for some years had been a professor in Codrington College, Barbadoes, in the West Indies, whence he had lately come. To my natural surprise that he should be so far astray, he said he had been visiting a fellow Exeter man, a clergyman of the English Church, who was the rector of an Iowa parish. It further developed that his young blind companion belonged to a family in the parish, and that Mr. Grey had good-heartedly assumed the care of him during an outing on the river.

A trip from St. Louis to St. Paul by river is longer now than a trip across the Atlantic. I was nearly a week in my new companionship, and acquaintance grew and deepened fast. The young blindman, whose manners were agreeable, became a general favourite, and Mr. Grey and I found we had much in common. I mentioned to him that my errand in England the year before had been to find material for a life of Young Sir Henry Vane, the statesman and martyr of the English Commonwealth, and in his young days a governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay. This touched in him a responsive chord. He was familiar with the period and the character. He was a friend of Shorthouse whose novel, John Inglesant was a widely-read book of those days. He had helped Shorthouse in his researches for the book, and knew well the story of Charles I., and his friends and foes. He was himself a staunch Churchman, but mentioned with some pleasure that his name appeared among the Non-conformists. A sturdy noble of those days was Lord Grey of Groby, who opposed the King to the last, standing at the right hand of the redoubtable Colonel Pride at the famous "Pride's Purge," pointing out to him the Presbyterians whom the Ironside was to turn out of Parliament, in the thick of the crisis. To my inquiry as to whether Lord Grey of Groby was an ancestor, he was reticent, merely saying that the name was the same. I had begun to surmise that my new friend was allied with the Greys who in so many periods of English history have borne a famous part. Some years before, while sojourning in a little town on the Ohio River, a stroll carried me to a coal-mine in the neighbourhood. As I peered down two hundred feet into the dark shaft, a bluff, peremptory voice called to me to look out for my head. I drew back in time to escape the cage as it descended with a group of miners from a higher plane to the lower deeps. I thanked my bluff friend, who had saved my head from a bump. A pleasant acquaintance followed which led to his taking me down into the mine, a thrilling experience. He was an adventurous Englishman who had put money into a far-away enterprise, and come with his wife and children to take care of it. His wife was a lady well-born, a sister of Sir George Grey, twice governor of New Zealand, and at the time High Commissioner and governor of Cape Colony, one of the most interesting of the great English nation-makers of the South Seas. I came to know the lady, and naturally followed the career of her brother, who earned a noble reputation. Later I corresponded with him, and received from him his portrait and books. Referring to Sir George Grey in my talk with Mr. William Grey, I found that he knew him well and not long before, in a voyage of which he had made many into many seas, had visited New Zealand, and been a guest of Sir George Grey at his island-home in the harbour of Auckland. Was he related to Sir George? was my natural query. Again there was reticence. The name was the same, but the Greys were numerous.

The journey wore on. The resource of the steamer's company was to sit on the upper deck, watch the swollen river with its waifs of uprooted trees and the banks green with the summer, chatting ourselves into intimacy. The young blindman made good and very good, and his guardian, while keeping a lookout on his charge from under his well-worn traveller's cap, which I now knew had sheltered its owner in tropic hurricanes and icy Arctic blasts, discussed with me matters various and widely related. Nearing our journey's end, we sat in the moonlight, the Mississippi opening placidly before us between hazy hills. We had grown to be chums, and next morning we were to part. It was a time for confidences. "Well," said Mr. Grey, "I am going to get a good look at America, then I mean to return home and go into Parliament." I suggested there might be difficulties about that. English elections were uncertain, and how could he be at all sure that any constituency would want him. "Ah," said he, this time no longer reticent. "I am going into the House of Lords." "Indeed," said I in surprise, "and who are you really, Mr. William Grey?" At last he was outspoken. He was heir to the earldom of Stamford, his uncle the present earl, a man past eighty, childless, and in infirm health, must soon lay down the title. He was preparing himself for the responsibilities of the high position and believed it well to make a study of America. His father, a younger son, had been a clergyman in Canada, and he, though with an Oxford training, knew the world outside of England better than the old home. His direct ancestor was Lord Grey of Groby, whose father, an earl of Stamford, had been a Parliamentary commander in the years of the Civil War, and in the century before that, a flower of the house had been the Lady Jane Grey, who had perished in her youth on the scaffold, a possible heir to the English crown. So this outre personage, good-heartedly helping the blindman to an outing, and in a shy apologetic way getting into touch with an environment strange to him, was a high-born nobleman fitting himself for his dignities.

I had before invited Mr. Grey to visit me in St. Louis, for his seeming helplessness appealed to me from the first. He had met some hard rebuffs in his American contacts. I thought I might aid him in making his way. Returning in the autumn to my home, I heard from Mr. Grey that he was coming to be my guest, and in due time he arrived. I missed him at the station, but he presently appeared at our door in an express-waggon, sitting on the seat with the driver, in the midst of his belongings. He spent a week with us in the first American home he had known, and we found him an amiable and unobtrusive gentleman. He was a vigorous walker and explored the city well. His listless, seemingly inattentive eyes somehow scanned everything, and he judged well what he witnessed. He was an accomplished scholar and had a quiet humour. A little daughter half-playfully and half-wilfully, announced her intention to follow her own pleasure in a certain case. "Milicent is a Hedonist," said the guest, and the Oxford scholar brought Aristippus and Epicurus into odd conjunction with a Mississippi Valley breakfast-table. He laid aside his white woollen suit, but his attire remained unconventional, not to say outre. Even the wrinkled dress-suit in which he appeared at dinner, I think was the achievement of a tailor in the island of Barbadoes. His opera-hat was a wonder. He was, or was soon to be, a belted earl, but his belt only appeared on his pajamas, raiment of which I heard then for the first time. It had early appeared in our intercourse that the main interest of Mr. Grey lay in humane and religious work. He also was a devoted member of the Church of England. On Sunday morning we started early for the leading Episcopal Church but on the way he inquired as to the place of worship of the negro congregation of that faith. I confessed my ignorance of it, but he had in some way ascertained it, and I presently found myself following his lead down a rather squalid street where at last we came to the humble temple. Instead of hearing the bishop, a famous and eloquent man, he preferred to sit on a bare bench in the obscure little meeting-house, where he fraternised cordially with the dusky company we found there. He was more interested in our charities than in our politics and business, and in his quiet way during the week learned the story well. I introduced him to Southern friends who gave him letters to persons in the South. Provided with these he bade us good-bye at last, and went far and wide through what had been the Confederacy. He visited Jefferson Davis and many soldiers and politicians of note, getting at first-hand their point of view. I also gave him letters to some eminent men in the East, which he presented, meeting with a good reception. He made a wide and shrewd study of the United States, and I am glad to think I helped him. When I met him he was unfriended and without credentials, and his singularities were exposing him to some inconvenient jostling in our rough world. I opened some doors to him through which he pushed his way into much that was best worth seeing in American life. An old friend, a radical man of letters, wrote me afterwards that he enjoyed Mr. Grey, and he thought Mr. Grey enjoyed him although he believed that if he had been a pauper, a criminal, or even a bishop, Mr. Grey would have enjoyed him much more.

He returned to England and did not forget me, writing from time to time how his affairs progressed. Soon he entered into his own, the earldom of Stamford, finding about the same time his countess in an English vicarage. In the House of Lords he was not prominent, though the papers occasionally mentioned brief addresses by him. His main interest continued to be charitable work. He was a lay-preacher, and worked much in the east end of London, throwing the weight of his culture and high position into alleviating ignorance and poverty. He sent me interesting literature relating to the efforts of well-placed men and women to carry into slums and hovels sweetness and light. In due time a daughter was born to him, whom he named Jane Grey; and later a son, Lord Grey of Groby. I saw once in the London Graphic, or perhaps in the Illustrated News, charming pictures of these children with their interesting historic names. Though rigidly a Churchman he was not narrow. Lord Stamford sent me a handsome picture of himself, to which is affixed his signature as an earl and an elaborate seal. In an accompanying note he wrote that the seal was a careful facsimile of the one which an ancestor of his had affixed to the death-warrant of Charles I. He seemed to take pride in the fact that his forbear had borne a part in the ancient Non-conformist strivings. He came to America more than once afterward, as a delegate to charitable and peace Congresses. My dear friend Robert Treat Paine, President of the Peace Society and eminent philanthropist of Boston, knew him well and esteemed him highly—and he was the fellow of workers like him.

It is a picturesque moment in my life that I in this way came into association with a nobleman of the bluest blood. To outward appearance as I stumbled upon him so unexpectedly, he seemed effete. His odd shuffle and limp whiskers were dundrearily suggestive of a personality a bit mildewed. But I felt that what ineptitude there was, was only superficial; good, strong manhood lay underneath. His death took place some years since.

Burke's Peerage states that the family was ennobled by Richard Coeur de Lion, and has maintained itself in a high place for eight centuries. Privilege is a bough of the social tree from which we expect mere dead sea-fruit rather than a wholesome yield, but now and then the product holds something better than ashes. As we trace this stock through the ages, apples of Sodom, no doubt, will be found in abundance, but now and then it flowers into heroic manhood and lovely womanhood. My chance comrade of the St. Paul was a refined, high-purposed man, certainly a product of the worthier kind, and I am glad to count among my friends, William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford.

* * * * *

As a student of German, anxious to gain fluency of expression, and to train my ear to catch readily the popular idioms, I found that I must fill out my writing and reading by contact with men. After roving the streets of German cities, I packed a knapsack and set out upon the country-roads. I was, as the Germans say, gut zu Fuss, a stout walker, and I learned to employ for my longer expeditions the Bummel-Zug, an institution I commend highly to all in my situation. The Bummel-Zug is simply a "way" freight-train, to which in my time was attached a car for third-class passengers. It stopped at every village, and the fare was very low. It was convenient, therefore, for those too poor to be in a hurry, and for travellers like me whose purpose could be better served by loitering than by haste. The train proceeded leisurely, giving ample time for deliberate survey of the land, and the frequent pauses of indefinite length afforded opportunity for walks through the streets of remote hamlets and even into the country about, where the peasants with true Teuton Gemuethlichkeit always welcomed a man who came from America.

Thus on my legs and by Bummel-Zug I wandered far, arriving one pleasant day at the ancient city of Salzburg, close to the Bavarian Alps. I was anxious to see something of the Tyrol, and had been told that the Koenigs-See offered the finest and most characteristic scenery of that region. Salzburg was a suitable point of departure. The sky darkened and it began to rain heavily. Berchtesgaden, in the mountains, the nearest village to the Koenigs-See, was only to be reached by Eilwagen, a modification of the diligence, which forty years ago still held its place on the Alpine roads. I stood at the door of the inn, observing the company who were to be my fellow-passengers. There were two or three from the outside world, like myself, a few mountaineers with suggestions of the Tyrol in their garb, and one figure in a high degree picturesque, a Franciscan friar in guise as mediaeval as possible. His coarse, brown robe wrapped him from head to foot. A knotted cord bound his waist, the ends depending toward the pavement and swinging with his rosary. His feet were shod with sandals, and his head was bare, though an ample cowl was at hand to shelter it. His head needed no tonsure for age had made him nearly bald. His shaven face was kind and strong and he was in genial touch with the by-standers, to whom no doubt such a figure was not novel. Incongruously enough, the friar held over his head in the pouring rain a modern umbrella, his only concession to the storm and to modernity. Presently we climbed in for the journey, and I was a trifle taken aback when the monk by chance followed me directly, and as we settled into our seats was my close vis-a-vis. As we bumped along the rough road our legs became dove-tailed together, I as well as he wrapped in the coarse folds of his monkish robe, the rosary as convenient to my hand as to his, and as the vehicle swayed our heads dodged each other as we rocked back and forth. Thrown thus, as it were into the embrace of the past, I made the most of it and got as far as might be into the mediaeval. I found my friar charmingly companionable. His Bavarian patois was not easy to follow, nor could he catch readily the speech I had been learning in the schools. But we made shift and had much talk as we drove through the storm into the highlands. He was a brother in the monastery at Salzburg, but being out of health, was making his way to a hospice of his order above the valley. He had heard of America, and knew there were houses of his order in that strange land. He was doubtful of its location, and possibly an American was a creature with whom he had never till then been in touch. Under the scrutiny of his mild eyes I was being studied as a queer outlandish specimen, as he certainly was to me. We parted at last as good friends, his head now enveloped in the cowl, his sandals pattering off in the dusk toward the little cell that awaited him in the hospice, while I sought a place by the fire in the inn of Berchtesgaden. I learned afterward that he was well known and much venerated in Salzburg.

I came into the mountain-nook oddly companioned, and my exit thence was equally so, though greatly in contrast. For a day or two I was storm-bound, and felt the depression natural in a remote solitude, wrapped in by rain and fog, with no society but an unintelligible mountaineer or two. At last it cleared and the revulsion was inspiring. I found myself in a little green vale hemmed in by magnificent heights whose rocky summits were covered with freshly-fallen snow. Close at hand rose the Watzmann, a soaring pyramid whose summit was cleft into two sharp peaks inclined into some semblance of a bishop's mitre. My recent association with the monk had made vivid the thought of the old church, and it seemed fitting that there should be lifted high in air such a symbol of the domination under which the region lay. But my Protestant eyes regarded it cheerfully, glad to have within range an object so picturesque. I forthwith strapped on my knapsack, buckled my belt, and strode out for the Koenigs-See, which lay not far beyond. I walked briskly for a mile or two, stimulated by the abounding oxygen of the highland air, but presently found myself where the road forked and there was nothing to indicate which was my right path. The solitude seemed complete, but as I stood hesitating, I was relieved by the appearance of a pedestrian who emerged from a by-way. As I framed an inquiry I was deterred by a certain augustness in the stranger. I had rarely seen a man of finer bearing. His stature was commanding, his figure, even in the rough, loose walking-dress he wore, was full of symmetry. His elastic step showed vigour, and his face under his broad-brimmed Tyrolese hat had much manly beauty. Was he perhaps a prince in disguise? His friendly salutation, given in deep masculine tones with a good-natured smile, put me at ease as I told him my strait. He said in good German, which I was glad once more to hear after my experience of the mountain patois, that he was on the way to the Koenigs-See, that he knew the road, and we would walk on together. I accommodated myself to his stride and we settled into a pace which carried us rapidly toward our goal, meanwhile talking cheerfully. I had found it usually a good passport to say I was an American and I withheld nothing as to my antecedents and my present errand in Germany. He was more reticent. He lived in Prussia and was at the moment taking an outing. His affability did not go the length of revealing his true character. If he were a high personage incognito, I was not to know it.

We reached at last the shore of the Koenigs-See, a blue, deep lake at a high elevation, encircled by lofty peaks, splintered, storm-beaten, and capped by snow which never melts, far above the range of grass and trees. A group of women on the beach had ready two or three broad and rudely-built boats, and noisily clamoured for our patronage. We chose what seemed the best, and the women rowers with stout arms soon propelled us far from shore into the midst of the Alpine sublimity. A silence fell, broken only by the oar-beats. Then, where the precipices rose highest we paused. Suddenly a gun was fired. It broke upon the silence startlingly loud, and after an interval the report reverberated in a series of crashes from height after height, dying down into a dull murmur from the steep most distant. I was awed by the sight and the sound, and awed too, by my companion. He had thrown off his hat and knapsack and stood with his fine stature at the bow. His classic face was turned upward to the peaks, and with a look as if he felt their power. He waved his arms toward them as if in a salutation to things sentient. The man seemed to befit the environment, majestic though it was.

We returned sooner than we desired from our excursion on the water, the boat-women being over eager for new passengers. My companion resumed his knapsack and it was time to part. To his question as to my plan I replied that I was there simply for the scenery, that I purposed to make my way back to Salzburg on foot by the paths that promised most, and should be guided by whatever I might learn. He said that he, too, was bound for Salzburg, walking for pleasure; and when I thereupon suggested that we might go on together, he readily fell in, and we trudged forward. Comradeship grew strong as the day passed, then a night in an unfrequented inn, then another day. We discussed things near and far, ancient and recent, I talking most but he was always genial and quietly responsive, and my confidence was invited. I told him of the little fresh-water college in the West with which I was associated, my functions being partly pedagogic and partly pastoral, of the embarrassments of co-education as we found them, the difficulty in the uplift of too frivolous youth to a high moral and spiritual plane, the embarrassment in curbing characters too reckless into decorum and propriety. He listened sympathetically, with no discoverable cynicism in the rather grave smile he usually wore. As to whom he might be, he remained constantly reticent, though my curiosity increased as the hours flew. We passed not far from two or three mountain resorts, where tourists were gathered. Near such my companion showed some nervousness. There might be people there who knew him, and it suited him for the time to remain by himself. This I took as some small confirmation of my suspicion that he was a great personage. Physically certainly he was superbly endowed. The roads were rough and often steep, and I found the tramp fatiguing; but when I asked if he, too, were not tired, he laughed at the idea, tossing his burden or taking an extra climb as fresh as at the start. At night our cots were in the same room. As he stripped off his shirt and stood with head pillared upon a most stately neck, and massive, well-moulded chest and shoulders, he was statuesque indeed.

At last Salzburg came in sight. Though we had become quite intimate I had made no progress in penetrating to my comrade's true character. I had laid many an innocent little trap to induce him to speak more openly, but no slip on his part ever betrayed him. We entered the city and sat down together at a table in a public garden, near the castle of the old Bishops of Salzburg, ordering for each a glass of light wine, the parting-cup. Already, since our entrance into the city things had occurred which partly confirmed the theory I had formed as to the distinction of my comrade, and also aroused in my mind doubts not quite comfortable. He was an object of interest in the well-dressed crowd. That he was a conspicuously handsome man in a measure explained that, but there were signs, too, that some recognised him as a person well-known. When we were seated in the garden actual acquaintances began to appear, agile athletic young men, who were deferential but familiar. There were ladies, too, modest enough, but certainly unconventional, nimble free-footed beings, with feathers and ribbons streaming airily as they flitted. These, like the men, were deferential to my comrade, yet familiar. There seemed to be a renewing of some old tie that all were glad to reconnect. The young men were actively demonstrative, the ladies wove in and out smilingly, and my comrade in the midst beamed and grew voluble. Was it an environment into which a quiet American college functionary could properly fit? No due bounds were transgressed, but the atmosphere was certainly very Bohemian. My prince incognito, was he perhaps the Prince of Pilsen? While this happy mingling was going forward I sat somewhat aloof, disconcerted that my cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces were thus crumbling into comic opera. But now my comrade approached me, aglow with social excitement, and, with a franker look in his eyes than he had before shown, addressed me: "Mein lieber Herr Professor, we have had a good ramble together and talked about many things. You have been confidential with me, and hoped that I would be with you. I have preferred to hold back, but now as we part I ought to tell you who I am. I am the premier danseur in the ballet of the Royal Opera House in Berlin. Worn with the heavy work in Fantasca, which we produced elaborately and which ran long, I came down here when the season closed, for change and rest, and so fell in with you. These young Herren and Damen are the coryphes and figurantes, who in Berlin or in other cities have taken part with me in productions. Good people they are and unsurpassed as a corps de ballet." We touched glasses, shook hands, and I went my way leaving Comus with his rout, guileless, I hope, as Milton's innocent "Lady," but such scales never fell from her starry eyes as fell from mine. I knew well about Fantasca. During my last weeks in Berlin it had been much talked about, a splendid theatrical spectacle put on with consummate art, and lavish expenditure. I had not seen it. Heredity from eight Puritan generations reinforced by impecuniosity had kept me from that. But I had heard of the wonderful visions of beauty and grace. My handsome comrade of the Bavarian Alps had been at the centre of it all, the god Apollo, or whatever glittering divinity or genius it was that swayed the enchantments and led in the rhythmic circlings. Good cause indeed I had had to admire his physical beauty. He had been picked out for that no doubt among thousands, then painfully trained for years until in figure and frame he was a model.

The gay pleasure garden in which we had parted lay close to a gloomy monastic structure, centuries old, that from a height dominated the little town. The garden and the structure were symbols of what was most salient in that country—the ancient church braced against progress, with its power broken in no way, and on the other hand of a life interpenetrated with things graceful and refined, with art, music, and poetry, but seamed, too, with frivolity and what makes for the pleasures of sense. My two friends also were in their way types,—the cowled Franciscan, aloof in a mediaeval seclusion though he breathed nineteenth-century air, and the dancer whom I encountered in the vale, above which the Watzmann upholds forever its solemn mitre. But they were good fellows both, my comrade in and my comrade out. The monk's heart was not too shrivelled to flow with human kindness, and the dancer had not unlearned in the glare of the foot-lights the graces of a gentleman.

I profess to be a man of peace. Through training, environment, and calling I ought to be so, and yet there is a fibre in any make-up which has always throbbed strangely to the drum. Is it perhaps a streak of heredity? In almost every noteworthy war since the foundation of the country, men of my line have borne a part. I count ancestors who stood among the minute-men at Concord bridge. Another was in the redoubt at Bunker Hill. In the earlier time two great-great-grandfathers went out against Montcalm and were good soldiers in the Old French War. Still earlier a progenitor, whose name I bear, faced the Indian peril in King Philip's War, and was among the slain in the gloomy Sudbury fight Perhaps it is a trace from these ancient forbears still lingering in my blood that will respond when the trumpets blow, however I strive to repress it, and it has given me qualms.

I was not easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen's Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schoenbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram. Nor was I quite easy when I set out to climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below Airolo was so green with fertile pasture, and from the glaciers above me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him; then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward in his sheepskin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving host pressed after him into every death-yielding terror that man or nature could throw across his path.

That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not believe. Nor do I believe it is just for you, high-toned friend, to censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great historic battle-fields. Nothing deserves so to interest man as man himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected with man as the spots where he has fought? That we are what we are, indeed that we are at all,—that any race is what it is or is at all,—was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as well as every race can point back. And then nothing absorbs us like a spectacle of pain and pathos! Tragedy enchants, while it shocks. The field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most absorbing? And there is another side. Once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our captain told us in low tones that next day we were to go into battle. He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about duty. And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the fire-light to see if the rifles were in order. They would go into fire because duty said, "Save the country!" and when, soon after, the steeply-sloping angle of the enemy's works came into view, ominously red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one and that one fell, there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap close down and pushed ahead in the skirmish-line, was not thinking of duty. They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought of duty has always much to do with the going forward of weaponed men amongst the weapons. Men do fight, no doubt, from mere recklessness, from hope of plunder or glory; and sometimes they have been scourged to it. But more often, where one in four or five is likely to fall, the nobler motive is uppermost with men and felt with burning earnestness too, which only the breath of the near-at-hand death can fan up. No! there is reason enough why battle-fields should be, as they are, places of pilgrimage. The remoteness of the struggle hardly diminishes the interest with which we visit the scene; Marathon is as sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year. Nor, on the other hand, do we need poetic haze from a century or two of intervening time: Gettysburg was a consecrated spot to all the world before its dead were buried. There need be no charm of nature; there are tracts of mere sand in dreary Brandenburg, where old Frederick, with Prussia in his hand, supple and tough as if plaited into a nation out of whip-cord, scourged the world; and these tracts are precious. On the other hand, the grandest natural features seem almost dwarfed and paltry beside this overmastering interest. On the top of the Grimsel Pass there is a melancholy, lonely lake which touches the spirit as much as the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring Finster-Aarhorn, the Todten See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags. Had I defined all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen's spire or the St. Gotthard. We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with especial willingness toward battle-fields. There man is most in earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and solemn. It is right that the sacrifice they have witnessed should possess an alchemy to make their acres golden.

The humane, and I hope I may be counted among the number, have long wished that some milder arbitrament than that of arms might intervene to settle the disagreements of men. No such arbitrament has as yet come into being. We settle our disputes in this way, and history must record the struggles, however reluctantly. As an historical writer, it has been my function to deal with times of conflict in various periods and lands. When I was seventy years old I began writing a history of our Civil War. To have at hand the literature of the period I went to Washington, where the most kind officials of the Library of Congress assigned to me a roomy alcove in the north curtain with a desk and ample surrounding shelves. These were filled for me by expert hands with whatever I might require for my task, and a screen shut off my corner from the corridor through which at times perambulated Roosevelt, and other secluded delvers, intent on early Gaelic literature and what not. Here I spent the most of two years, finding it an ideal spot, but my task required more than an examination, under the quiet light of my great window, of books and documents. The fields themselves must also be surveyed, so I travelled far until I had visited the scene of nearly every important conflict and traced the lines of march in the great campaigns. I was already a haunter of old battle-fields, that thread of heredity, from a line of forbears very martial in their humble way, asserting itself in whatever lands I wandered. I had been at Hastings, and had traced the Ironsides to Marston Moor and Naseby. I had stood by the Schweden-Stein at Luetzen, and tramped the sod of Leipsic and Waterloo. It was for me now to see our own fields of decision, fields ennobled by a courage as great and a purpose as high as soldiers have ever shown.

To mark Waterloo the Belgians reared a mound of huge dimensions, scraping the terrain far and near to obtain the earth. Wellington is said to have remarked that the features of the ground had been so far obliterated by this that he could not recognise his own positions. One wonders whether the future may not blame our generation for transformations almost as disguising. Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, and Shiloh are now elaborate parks. No mounds have been reared, but the old roads are smooth boulevards, trim lawns are on the ragged heights, the landscape-gardener has barbered the grim rough face of the country-side into something very handsome no doubt, but the imagination must be set to work to call back the arena as it was on the battle-day. From various points of vantage memorials make appeal, statues, obelisks, Greek temples, and porches, bewildering in their number, and now and then making doubtful claims. "This general," some scrutiniser will tell you, "never held the line ascribed to him and that pompous pile falsely does honour to troops who really wavered in the crisis." I know I run counter to prevailing sentiment in saying that I prefer a field unchanged, not with features blurred by an overlaying of ornamental and commemorative accretions. A few markers of the simplest, and a plain tablet now and then where a hero fell or valour was unusually conspicuous, should suffice, for a field is more impressive that lies for the most part in its original rudeness and solitude. At Antietam I found little obtrusive. Sherman's fields on the way to and about Atlanta have not been marred; nor at Franklin and Nashville are the plains parked and obelisked out of recognition. At Bull Run I climbed with a veteran of the signal-service into the top of a high tree, an old war-time station, on the hill near the Henry House. The precarious platform remained. From such an eyrie in the same grove, perhaps from this same tree, a Southern friend of mine, on the battle-day, caught sight more than two leagues away of the glint of sunlight on cannon and bayonets toward Sudley Springs, and sent timely notice to Beauregard that a Federal column was turning his left. Under my eye the landscape was unchanged, with no smoothings or intrusions to embarrass the imagination in making the scene real. But it was in the Wilderness that I felt especially grateful that the wild thickets for the most part had been let alone. I found at Fredericksburg an old Confederate, one of Mahone's command, and hiring an excellent roadster, we drove on a perfect autumn day first to Spottsylvania Court House, then across country to the Brock road, then home by the Wilderness church and Chancellorsville. On the area we traversed were fought four of our most memorable battles, an area now scarcely less tangled and lonely than when the Federals poured across the Rappahannock into its thickets by the thousand, and were so memorably met. My veteran knew the pikes and the by-paths, and we fraternised with the warmth usual among foemen who at last have become friends. He knew the story well of every wood-path and cross-roads. Certainly I was glad that the rugged acres had undergone no "improvement," and that the eye fell so nearly on what the old-time soldiers saw. It so happened it was election-day. There were polling-places at the court-houses of Fredericksburg and Spottsylvania, at Todd's Tavern, and the Chancellor house, names bearing solemn associations. The neighbourhoods had come out to vote, and introduced by my comrade, I had some interesting encounters. It was a good climax, when toward the end, near the Chancellor House, we met in the road a patriarchal figure, whitebearded and sturdy, on his way home from the polls. It was old Talley, whose log-house, in 1862, was the point from which Stonewall Jackson began his sudden rush upon Hooker's right. Talley, then a young farmer, had walked at the General's stirrup pointing out the way. He had interesting things to tell of Stonewall Jackson at that moment when his career culminated. "What did he seem like?" I queried. "He was as cool and business-like as an old farmer looking after his fences." On an old battle-field which had been illustrated by an achievement of the Stonewall division especially brilliant, I chanced to meet a grey veteran who had taken part in it, a North Carolinian who had come back to review the scene. We fraternised, of course. "What did Stonewall Jackson look like?" I said. Stepping close to me, the "Tarheel" extended his two gnarled forefingers, and pressed between the tips my cheek-bones on either side. "He had the broadest face across here I ever saw," he said. Such a physiognomical trait is perhaps indicative of power of brain and will, but I do not recall it among the usual descriptions of Jackson.

Naturally, after surveying much Virginia country once war-swept, as I came to the head of the Shenandoah Valley, I could not miss a visit to Lexington, where repose in honoured graves two such protagonists as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is a beautiful town among low mountains green to the summit, and in the streets not a few lovely homes of the Virginia colonial type, draped with ivy and wisteria. There stand the buildings of Washington and Lee University, in the chapel of which lies buried Robert E. Lee, and a short mile beyond is the Virginia Military Institute, from which Stonewall Jackson went forth to his fame. The memorial at Jackson's grave is appropriate, a figure in bronze, rugged as he was in face and attire, the image of him as he fought and fell. Different, but more impressive is the memorial of Lee. You enter through the chapel where the students gather daily, then passing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where nobly conceived in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as champion in chief of the "Lost Cause," but the light on his face is not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to the Military Institute. Stonewall Jackson had been for ten years a teacher there. The turf of the parade I was crossing had perhaps felt no footfall more often than his. Two or three hundred pupils, the flower of Virginia youth, were assembled in battalion, and I witnessed from a favourable point their almost perfect drill. As the sun was about to set, they formed in a far-extending line, with each piece at present. They were saluting the flag, which now began slowly to descend from, its staff. Lo, it was the flag of the Union. The band played, I thought, with unusual sweetness, the Star-Spangled Banner, and to the music those picked youths of the South, sons and grandsons of the upholders of the right to sever, did all possible honour, on the sod which Stonewall Jackson trod, hard by the grave of Lee, to the symbol of a country united, states now and hereafter in a brotherhood not to be broken! It was a scene to evoke tears of deep emotion, for never before or since has it come home to me so powerfully that the Union had been preserved.

Closing as I do now my record of memories, I feel that the most momentous of the crises through which it has been my lot to pass is that attending the maintenance of the Federal bond in the United States. Assemblies of veterans of the Confederacy and those who address them scout the idea that they fought to preserve negro bondage. A late historian of our Civil War, Professor Paxon, of Wisconsin, holds it to be "reasonably certain" that in another generation slavery would have disappeared of itself, a contention surely open to dispute. Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve! Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle was that a State could not be coerced,—and that therefore sovereignty lay in the scattered constituents and not at the centre. The arbitrament of the sword was sharp and swift, and happily for the world it went against them. I well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched and seamed with bewildering spots of colour. The effort was to portray the position of some three hundred independent political units, duchies, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute. It seemed like a pathological chart presenting a face broken out with an unseemly tetter. The land indeed, in those days, was afflicted by a sad political disease. The Germans call it "Particularismus" or "Vielstaaterei," the breaking up of a nationality into a mass of fragments. Some on the map were scarcely larger than pinheads, and in actual area hardly exceeded a fair-sized farm. In that time Heine laughed at one of them after this fashion, while describing a journey over it in bad weather:

"Of Bueckeburg's principality Full half on my boots I carried. Such muddy roads I've never beheld Since here in the world I've tarried."

The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity of Germany and the character of her people. She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion. Spirits like Leasing and Goethe, all but derided patriotism. It scarcely held a place among the proper virtues. The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious, jealous over a petty "balance of power" and always liable to war. The disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy's imagination was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all that is best in human nature. For a few years, before the adoption of the Constitution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest. In 1787 came the beneficent change. The thirteen and those that followed the thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying in many lands. Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one. Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the "Little Englanders," once a noteworthy company, succumbed to a conquering sentiment that England should become a "great world-Venice," and the seas no longer barriers, but the highways, through which the parent-state and her brood of dominions, though flung far into many zones, should yet go easily to and fro, not separate nations, nor yet a company bound together by a mere rope of sand, but one. Great nations replaced little states.

Had the South prevailed in the Civil War, there would have been a distinct and calamitous set-back in the world movement. It would have been a reaction toward particularism, and how far might it not have gone? Into what granulations might not our society have crumbled? The South's principle once recognised, there could have been no valid or lasting tie between States. Counties even might have assumed to nullify, and towns to stand apart sufficient unto themselves. When the thing was doubtful with us, the North by no means escaped the infection. The New York City of Fernando Wood contemplated isolation not only from the Union but from the State of which it was a part. Had the spirit then so rife really prevailed, the map of America to-day might have been no less blotched with the morbid tetter of particularism than that of the Germany of sixty years ago. Centralisation may no doubt go too far, but in the other extreme may lie the gravest danger, and rushing thitherward the South was blind to the risk. I stood with all reverence by the graves of the two great men at Lexington. Perhaps no Americans have been in their way more able, forceful, and really high-purposed. But they were misguided, and their perverted swords all but brought to pass for us and the future the profoundest calamity. I am proud to have been in the generation that fought them down, believing that upholding the country was doing a service to the world. I think of that lofty sentence inscribed upon the memorial of Goldwin Smith at Ithaca, "Above all nations is Humanity." Patriotism is not the highest of virtues. It is indeed a vice if it limits the sympathies to a part. Love for the whole is the sovereign virtue, and the patriotism is unworthy which is not subordinate to this, recognising that its only fitting work is to lead up to a love which embraces all.