126 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



ences in the far East; once back into his reminiscences of his 

 sane life, he would run on for a while, a most delightful com- 

 panion. The dear fellow soon saw the way I managed to keep 

 hold of his sound remainder, and his dumb gratitude, told in 

 look and tone in the way only the gentle soul can tell it, moves 

 me as I write these lines. I have long forgotten his name, but 

 his face stays with me, the brave face of a man who was fight- 

 ing to save his remnant from the deep, so that I would know 

 it at a glance if it came again to view. 



The last time I was with Emerson over a Sunday at Green- 

 field, it must have been in the autumn of 1861, we talked 

 over the matter of his end, which was then evidently not far 

 off. His regret seemed to be not for the early passing of his life, 

 but for the failure of his plans for work that would remain un- 

 done. He turned to the disposition of his little patrimony, some 

 twenty thousand dollars, which he desired to leave for scholar- 

 ships in the Scientific School, to which he was attached by the 

 sense of its large purposes and certain future, but he desired to 

 mingle his care for the unknown with benefaction to those who 

 had been near to him by giving a life estate on his property 

 to H. or myself. It was decided that it should be H., who had 

 least in the way of expectations. So it was thus arranged. Our 

 mutual friend had the benefit of the trust until his death thirty 

 years after Emerson passed. That the money, which now helps 

 to support poor students in the University, will perpetuate 

 George Emerson's name for ages is my hope. All else of him, 

 the infinite else of his great nature, the world will never know. 



I never saw Emerson after our last meeting in Greenfield, 

 but in the autumn of 1862 I had a letter from him which came 

 to me in active campaign while Bragg was in Kentucky, in 

 which he told me that his disease was making progress, that he 

 could not die in peace with the sense that Hyatt and I were in 

 the lines, and he crawling about his home. He begged me to find 

 for him the chance to stand up for a punch in the good cause. 

 I took time to write him that this was impossible ; that it needed 



