78 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



mug. In matters of history, he had read widely. One of his 

 favorite themes was the mediaeval history of Italy. I recall 

 with a distinctness which shows the impressiveness of his dis- 

 courses his story of Florence, so well told that ten years after, 

 when I saw the town for the first time, the shape of it and of 

 the neighboring places was curiously familiar. Along with some 

 other youths, I noted down the dates of events as he gave them 

 and looked them up. We never caught him in an error, though 

 at times he was so drunk that he could hardly stand up. I have 

 known many historians who doubtless much exceeded him in 

 learning, but never another who seemed to have such a capacity 

 for living in the events he narrated. 



I had no sooner met " Tom" Marshall than we became friends. 

 He at once took a curious fancy to me, talked to me as though 

 we were of an age, and gave me my first chance of such contact 

 with a man of learning and imagination. The relation, while 

 on one side largely profitable to me, became embarrassing, for 

 the unhappy man got the notion that I could stop his drinking 

 if I would stay with him. A number of times when he had his 

 dipsomaniac fury upon him I found that by sitting by his bed 

 and talking with him on some historical subject, or rather lis- 

 tening to his talk, he would apparently forget about his drink 

 and in a few hours drop asleep and awake to be sober for some 

 months. 



Sometimes these quiet interviews were most interesting 

 to me. I recall one of them when I found him in an attack 

 of half delirium. His memory, always active, took him back to 

 the days when he was in Congress and to a scene when he, 

 a very young member of the House, had been chosen by some 

 careful elders to lead an attack on John Quincy Adams. They, 

 the elders, were to come to his support when he had drawn 

 the enemy's fire. It all became so real to him, that he sprang 

 out of bed and in his tattered nightgown gave, first his own 

 speech with all the action of a young orator, and then the de- 

 liberate, crushing rejoinder of his mighty antagonist. At the 



