38 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



Before we parted he had urged me whenever I should come 

 to the region to make my home with him. He explained 

 his course of life so that I would have no doubt where to 

 find him — whether in Locust street or in Tower Grove. 

 The result was that I shared his hospitality not unf requently 

 during well-nigh a quarter of a century, and twenty years 

 after our first acquaintance welcomed him under my own 

 roof. 



In our familiar talks he gave me many a leaf from his 

 life-history. His school training was at Mill Hill, a Con- 

 gregational ist academy near London. He loved to remem- 

 ber a cedar tree there which had been planted by 

 Linnaeus in 1736. Six years ago he pointed me to a tree 

 near his grounds set out by himself and which had grown 

 to be a hundred feet high. He was pleased when I quoted 

 the couplet, 



" A forest planted by himself he sees, 

 And loves its old contemporary trees." 



He said each boy at Mill Hill had a square rod of ground 

 assigned to him that he might till it just as he chose. If 

 the child is father of the man — we here discern "the 

 baby figure of the giant mass of things to come at large." 



He told of voyaging with his father on an old Danish 

 prize-vessel seventy-four days before they reached Quebec, 

 of business outlooks there and at Montreal as not flatter- 

 ing, — of his New England sleigh rides to reach New York. 

 As there seemed no room for him there he sailed to New 

 Orleans, a voyage of twenty-three days. 



Here Mr. Shaw was welcomed by an old family friend 

 on his sugar plantation, and half resolved to become a 

 sugar planter himself. But he knew more about cutlery 

 than about cane-brakes. So, finding himself within ninety 

 days of St. Louis by keel-boat, he resolved to go up the 

 river. He was about going aboard a keel-boat when a 

 schooner-rigged vessel arrived from Philadelphia which was 

 also equipped as ft steamer, and promised a passage to the 



