A VISIT TO MASSACHUSETTS 69 



Among these old familiars of my father were men who as 

 persons interested me much. There was Cornelius C. Felton, 

 professor of Greek in Harvard College, and afterwards its presi- 

 dent, a large and large-hearted man ; Horatio Greenough, who 

 also dwelt in Cambridge; Epes Sargent Dixwell, a schoolmaster 

 of renown ; Charles T. Jackson, the chemist and geologist, and 

 many others with whom I was afterwards to have relations. 

 I recall in Jackson's house how he told my father the story of 

 his relations to the discovering of ether and how Morton had 

 cheated him out of his fame, and how he wept and raved in the 

 telling. I had never before seen a man thus chagrined, and 

 wondered greatly why he should be so about such a trifle 

 as it seemed to me then and ever since. When we came away, 

 my father said to me that in his opinion Jackson had been the 

 discoverer, but that he was a rather timid person and did not 

 venture to make the full trial of the agent himself, and so had 

 turned to Morton as a person who would take the risk of the 

 experiment. 



At first sight, Harvard College greatly interested me. It was 

 then a small affair, but to me, who had never seen anything of 

 the kind, it seemed very great. From it I had the first sense of 

 historic antiquity as it is embodied in edifices. There were then 

 only what are now termed the old buildings of the Yard and the 

 Divinity School and the old Medical School in Boston. 



In 1857, because I suffered much with ague, I was sent for 

 three months to Sag Harbor on Long Island, where I stayed 

 with a sister of my father's. I was then a lanky youth of a soli- 

 tary, phlegmatic temper. I spent my time tramping the woods 

 and keeping company with the sea. I had no congenial society, 

 save that of certain rough sailors, some of them Lascars, a 

 distinctly bad lot, but they interested me and taught me a bit 

 of sea and ship lore that afterwards I had a chance to find serv- 

 iceable. I remember best a sojourn on Montauk Point, then a 

 solitary land where considerable herds of cattle wandered over 

 the watery open country. They were wild, after the manner 



