FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



of mine. So also was Fred White, the son of the President of 

 the University. I should also state that another old boyhood 

 friend was Frank Finch, the oldest son of Francis M. Finch, later 

 Judge of the Supreme Court of New York, who during his 

 early days was a poet of much ability. When he was a student 

 at Yale he wrote a number of Yale songs, and at the close of the 

 Civil War he published that wonderful and beautiful poem, 

 "The Blue and the Gray," which has been recited at the Decora- 

 tion Day exercises all over the north on every thirtieth of May 

 since that time. It may interest many to know that Judge 

 Finch was at that time a Democrat in politics. In those days 

 of high political excitement he was even called a "Copperhead." 

 Therefore, the following will, I am sure, be interesting. In the 

 spring of 1866 I was walking up the hill one day towards our 

 house when I saw Judge Finch leaning against the fence and 

 sobbing. I was shocked and curious, and said, "Why, Mr. Finch, 

 what is the matter.?" He turned and choked out between sobs, 

 "Leal, the news has just come that President Lincoln has been 

 murdered." 



Possibly I have said more than enough about the boyhood 

 days in Ithaca and the student life at Cornell. But it is hard to 

 leave that period. I suppose that everyone feels the same way 

 about that sort of thing. At the age of nearly seventy-five, writ- 

 ing, as it happens, at the present moment in Paris, and having 

 lived for much more than two-thirds of my life away from 

 Ithaca, my mind goes back constandy to college days. I often 

 think, for example, of stealing hickory nuts on the margin of 

 Ezra Cornell's big place, and I can visualize old Ezra himself, 

 with his long black coat and his stove-pipe hat and his big stick, 

 coming out of his house in a very bad temper to stop the pilfering. 

 The old gendeman (he wasn't so very old then, but he seemed 

 so to me) always wore a stove-pipe hat, and I smiled to myself 



[16] 



