The Days of a Man 1875 



or crown of gold, only for a chance at a place "on 

 the bleachers where ten thousand Hoosier poets 

 sit." * 



TWO Among my most valued friends in the state at 



friends \^g^ j countec | > r j onn Sloan of New Albany, a 



large native of Maine, a man of friendly and attractive 

 personality, a fine type of the well-rounded country 

 doctor. Sloan devoted the leisure of a busy practice 

 of medicine to the study of the Natural History of 

 the Ohio Valley. He thus acquired a thorough 

 knowledge of birds and crayfishes, beetles and snails, 

 and in later years of bacteria, of which group of 

 organisms he prepared many slides; these, ac- 

 companied by slides of plant tissues, he presented 

 to the University of Indiana. 



William Dudley Foulke, whose delightful home at 

 Richmond I have at times visited, will appear in 

 later pages. 



At At the end of a fairly successful year in Indian- 



a Phs> I went at the request of Professor Shaler as 

 instructor in his :< Harvard Summer School of 

 Geology" at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. On my 

 way to the Gap, for adventure's sake and accompa- 

 nied by a young engineer named Harper from 

 Purdue University, I took a cross-country tramp of 

 some days' duration. Coming upon a number of 

 backwoods baseball teams, we occasionally joined 

 in for a game, Harper as catcher, I as pitcher. The 

 possibility of throwing curved balls was just then 



1 A "bleacher" is an uncovered seat outside the grand stand at a baseball 

 game. "Hoosier" is a nickname of unknown origin applied to Indiana folk. 



C 138 3 



