A SWISS TUTOR 61 



middle age was in the classics and in the poetry of his own lan- 

 guage. All the rest of life appeared to be unreal to him. It was 

 probably the admirable contrast of the quality of this dreamer 

 with those about me that caused me to cleave to him ; so that 

 we were for three years very near to one another. Naturally 

 curious about people and their ways, I found in Escher a revela- 

 tion of a new genus of mankind ; his ways of looking at matters 

 curiously interested me. Moreover, in this my fifteenth year, I 

 began to have some capacity for continuous work and did my 

 hard lessons in Latin, Greek, and German under his tutorage 

 with assiduity. His method of teaching was for me the best. 

 As soon as I could read Latin with a little facility, he forced me 

 to read aloud to him rapidly without rendering into English, he 

 reading brief comments in that language and compelling me 

 to ask my questions as best I could also in Latin. In this way 

 he forced me to think in the language we had in hand. I had 

 already been fairly trained in Latin grammar; I was now made 

 to use Zumpt's more ancient but better work. In this way we 

 went over a much larger body of literature than the ordinary 

 student traverses, including all of Virgil, Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, 

 parts of Horace, Tacitus, etc. From the point of view of scholar- 

 ship, this left much to be desired, yet as I was made to commit 

 a large part of the Iliad and much of Cicero, I am inclined to 

 think that I had more of value from my tasks than most students 

 gain. In Greek his method was similar; but I went not near 

 so far with him in that language as in Latin. I did some com- 

 position work in the way of written translations and a little of 

 it in metric form, but this part of his teaching was ill done. 



In German, Escher pushed me forward rapidly in speaking, 

 writing, and reading, so that while with him I read practically 

 all of the poetic work of Goethe and Schiller and parts of the 

 other notable poets who have written in that language. At that 

 stage of my life I had already gained some acquaintance with 

 English poetry and had acquired the art of committing verse in 

 such a measure that I had won a wager by committing Byron's 



