which, | suppose, is inevitable with such sedentary work. 
His eyes are simply marvelous, piercing; and yester- 
day, while painting a leaf, he worked most of the time 
without glasses, and he is seventy-one! He speaks freely 
of his age, of the work which can possibly still be aeeom- 
plished and of the fact that he is the only one in the 
world who ean do it; which I think is true. You would 
never find another man who combined the scientific 
knowledge of many years’ study of plant and animal 
life; the study of glass, its component parts and its possi- 
bilities, not merely book knowledge but derived from 
experiment as well; together with the power of concen- 
tration, mental and moral; the artistic ideal as a load- 
star which has enabled him to forego everything called 
pleasure, except his wife. She is sweet and devoted to 
his ideal, too, has softened and broadened him, and so 
humanized him that he is much better fitted to come in 
contact with the world than the Rudolph Blaschka who 
came to America in 1896. 
He is just as modest and absolutely honorable as he 
ever was, but now he has a sense of his own worth, his 
own unusual force of intellect and character; and there 
is everything to justify that. I asked him one day whether 
he was still applied to for models to be kept in Germany, 
and he said, ‘‘Oh yes.’ Professor Neumann, to whom he 
went for something at your suggestion, asked why he 
would not give them some of his work. I asked what he 
replied. ‘‘Oh,’’ he said, ‘‘I told him that I worked for 
Harvard University, that I was a man of absolute honor 
so would make no change and was satisfied.” 
I found that Sunday was his one day of rest and, sus- 
pected, from previous knowledge, that he was not taking 
enough time for air and exercise and was perhaps work- 
ing late in the evening. I extracted the information that 
lately he had taken little or no time for fresh air and had 
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