"Uncle Billy" wheeled around in his swivel chair and, looking keenly 

 at me over his glasses, exclaimed: "God bless my soul! all this so young! 

 What's left for you, when you arrive at years of discretion?" 



Having shot his bolt at me; General Sherman looked over my appli- 

 cation and wrote an endorsement of cordial approval. With this power- 

 ful backing, I had no difficulty with the Secretary, who was, I think, 

 Mr. Robert Lincoln. If not at this time, then subsequently and on a 

 similar errand, I had a very pleasant interview with Mr. Lincoln. He 

 said that he thought it was the duty of the Government to aid science 

 whenever practicable, especially in such matters as were covered in my 

 application. 



When I returned home, I related my experience with General Sher- 

 man greatly to the amusement of the family and especially of my 

 Uncle, Colonel Stockton, who had known "Uncle Billy" in the Civil 

 War. My Mother, on the contrary, didn't like it at all and, going ofl 

 on some visit shortly afterward, she wrote me a letter, in which she 

 said: "I must ask you please not to tell that story again — it sounds so 

 conceited, on your part." Vanity, conceit, presumption, or pushfulness 

 in any guise, were anathema to her and any manifestation of them 

 by her sons annoyed her past endurance. I never saw the anecdote in 

 the same light and so have not hesitated to tell it here. 



It may seem that I was a very cool and recreant lover, thus to desert 

 my promised bride for a second summer and that she was not much 

 better, when, in the following autumn, she ran away to Germany for a 

 year. But such seeming is deceptive; in both cases the separation was 

 demanded by a sense of duty. It was no yearning for the "great open 

 spaces," no desire for "the simple life," that sent me to the West year 

 after year. The discomfort of camp life, the pains of rheumatism and 

 sunburn, the difficulty, often the impossibility of bodily cleanliness, 

 to say nothing of the separation from my family, combined to make 

 these expeditions a hardship, but, as will be explained later there was 

 compensation in the enduring delight of discovery, in pushing forward 

 the frontiers of knowledge. 



[ M9 ] 



