16 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



America was Mr. Shaw's country not merely by adoption, 

 but by deliberate and well-considered choice — a choice he 

 never regretted and of which he was always proud. When 

 he retired from business he was in the prime of manhood, 

 and with wealth amply sufficient in those days for the grat- 

 ification of tastes far more luxurious than were his. It 

 would have enabled him to live in England, or in any part 

 of the Continent, much more easily and pleasantly, as a 

 gentleman of leisure, than it was then possible to do in 

 America. He had nothing except personal preference to 

 keep him here, and very much, one would suppose, to in- 

 duce him to take up permanent residence abroad. Yet after 

 long and repeated absences — which, in most cases, would 

 have ended in such residence — he returned to St. Louis to 

 live and to die ; to begin, carry forward, and consummate 

 the life-work with which his name will be forever associated. 



Yet while Mr. Shaw was so thoroughly American in the 

 true sense of the word, he was as thoroughly English in all 

 those hereditary traits, ideas, and habits which are born in 

 us and not made by us, and which inevitably take their 

 shape and color from the soil and stock from which we 

 spring. *' Blood is thicker than water," and the English 

 blood transmitted by a long line of unmixed English an- 

 cestry was always strong in him. He did not love England 

 the less because he loved America more, and his attach- 

 ment for the land of his birth remained deep and ardent — 

 thoush undemonstrative — to the last. He liked to have 

 about him things which reminded him of his old home. 

 Much of the furniture in both his town and country house 

 was of English manufacture of fifty years ago; most of 

 the pictures and prints upon the walls were of English sub- 

 jects, and he preferred to read his favorite authors in the 

 English editions throujjh which he first knew them. He 

 was systematic in everything, as Englishmen of his gener- 

 ation were much more than they are now. Systematic in 

 personal habits: eating, drinking, sleeping, exercise and 

 recreation ; to which regularity, guided always by pru- 



