ALPHEUS HYATT 121 



goal, such as he had set for himself. I felt that much of his 

 denunciation was well founded somehow I never cared for 

 goals, the mileposts have proved more interesting to me. 

 What I had absorbed of philosophy, and had insensibly shaped 

 into a plan of life, made me interested in thinking and doing 

 for their own sakes and not for those accomplishments which 

 bred fame. On this, as on most other matters, we had endless 

 profitable quarrels, such as lead to firm friendship. We were 

 together for a year, when we concluded that we were both 

 naturally solitaries, and he moved to Divinity Hall just across 

 the way. We parted to be even better friends and more helpful 

 to each other than before. The bond lasted until his death in 

 1902. 



After Hyatt left me I had no permanent chum. For a time 

 Leslie Waggener, another Kentuckian, who was a student in 

 the College, lodged with me, and we were very near to one an- 

 other until he graduated (in 1861) and went directly to the 

 Confederate army. The first Confederate uniform I saw, he had 

 made in Boston and donned for our diversion just before he 

 went away, he knowing that Hyatt and I were soon to be his 

 official enemies. We thought nothing of this incident at the 

 time, but seen across the years I see the pathos of it. 



Waggener's name reminds me of another friend of those 

 years ; the reason for the reminder I shall tell below. This other 

 was Philip Sidney Coolidge, a grandson of Thomas Jefferson. 

 I met Coolidge when I first came to Cambridge. We ate at the 

 same table, and though he was some six or eight years my 

 senior we soon became intimate. He was then an assistant in 

 the Observatory. The common ground was, as I recall it, a 

 common longing for the width of the world. I have seen much 

 of men, but never another who was as curiously interesting as 

 this son of an ancient and staid Boston family. Coolidge was 

 brought up in France, and spoke his English with a French ac- 

 cent, for which misfortune he berated his forbears who were 

 responsible for it. He was a rather small, delicate person, with 



