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Nea | McAtexr, In Memoriam F. E. L. Beal. 247 
the Institute. This he passed on October 5 and class work was 
begun October 7. At the end of his 1867 diary, he remarks “I 
have been sitting alone studying all the evening, thinking of the 
past and trying to look forward into the dark, misty future, and 
wondering what another year has of joy or sorrow, in store for me; 
but joy or sorrow it matters little which, a few short years and both 
will be as naught in the light of a higher and nobler future.” 
During the summer vacation of 1868, he superintended the out- 
side work of prisoners of the Leominster jail, and at the end of the 
summer cared for his foster parents, both of whom were sick. Mrs. 
Day died in December, 1868, a great loss to the young man. Other- 
wise the school year of 1868-9 was uneventful. In the summer of 
1869, he took a leisurely western trip by way of Chicago, Burlington, 
Iowa, up the Mississippi River to St. Paul, back to Prairie du 
Chien, Wis., Niagara Falls, N. Y., and home. Besides this, he 
made two short camping trips, one of them in New Hampshire. 
The next summer vacation was taken up by several similar outings. 
From the second year on, throughout his course, Professor Beal 
was President of his class. He was older than most of his class- 
mates and evidently filled well the réle of an elder brother. The 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology was young and when 
Professor Beal graduated in 1872, he was the oldest living graduate, 
a distinction which he naturally held the remainder of his life. 
During his third and fourth years at the Institute, he taught lower 
classmen, which sufficiently indicates that his record was a good 
one. The entry in his diary for March 17, 1870, is: “Delivered 
my first lecture today.” 
Professor Beal received his degree March 8, 1872, but continued 
school work until April 29 when he left for the West, his destination 
being Crete, Nebraska, where he began surveying for the Burling- 
ton and Missouri River Railroad, which is now known as the 
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. This season in the prairies gave 
him an opportunity of studying nature under conditions entirely 
different from those in New England. From a sketch-book he 
kept at the time (and he was no mean artist), it is evident he was 
strongly impressed by the presence of antelope and of the abundant 
remains of the buffalo. This sketch-book contains pictures also 
of a horsefly, lubber grasshopper, milkweed butterfly, hog-nosed 
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