92 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



during the winter and spring in Cambridge, and during the 

 summer in Keene, New Hampshire. In Cambridge, I found 

 myself in an unhappy social position, for the reason that my 

 station as a sub-freshman, as an inferior to the men of my own 

 age already in college, was humiliating to my sense of self-im- 

 portance, and in marked contrast to that I had won at home. 

 In Keene, I found myself in a charming New England com- 

 munity, where the life resembled that to which I was native. 

 There the fact that I could ride, shoot, act in theatricals, spout 

 poetry, and descant on philosophy put me back into the class 

 of men, so that I was myself again. While in Keene, there came 

 an odd interest in my education which, though but a trifle, 

 proved most telling. My tutor, with whom I had read much 

 Latin verse in a manner which he approved, for my scanning 

 was uncommonly good, I had a natural ear for it, one 

 day asked me the rule for the quantity of a syllable, only to 

 find that I was absolutely ignorant of such written prescrip- 

 tions. The long list of these rules was then produced they 

 were to be learned at once. Now I cannot by any contrivance 

 manage to fix in my mind a succession of irrelevances. If he 

 had commanded me to commit all of Ovid, I should willingly 

 have set about the task; as it was, I asked him if in his opinion 

 Horace had learned those precious rules. He was sure that he 

 had not, and equally certain that I must learn them if I had 

 any expectation of getting into Harvard College. On that issue 

 we parted. I refused to spend time on an unnecessary bit of 

 purely formal work. 



I was the more content to give up a training in Harvard Col- 

 lege, for the reason that my stay in Keene had convinced me 

 that I was more naturalist than humanist, in that I could not 

 content myself with the book side of culture. The life of the 

 fields, the brooks and rocks, was nearer to me than that of the 

 men and thoughts of long ago. Moreover, in some way I had 

 come across Agassiz's essay on classification, then just pub- 

 lished, and in it I found something at once of science and 



