RICHARD WHEATLAND 



127 



all of a well man's strength to keep one's feet long enough to take 

 the stroke; and that he would add one more to our cumbered 

 hospitals. I never heard from him again ; after this last lashing 

 out against fate, he sank into the repose that usually comes to 

 those who die of consumption, and passed quickly. 



One of my neighbors, rather than comrades, of Agassiz's train, 

 was , an interesting fellow who went about his tasks nim- 

 bly and merrily, but with an utterly commonplace motive which 

 made him quite uninteresting to our small hyperphilosophical 

 coterie. He was of my age to a year, but seemed to me hope- 

 lessly young, I suppose for lack of the aforesaid philosophy. 

 Had stuck to zoology he would have made a great dis- 

 sector of species, for he took to that dismal task as a duck does 

 to water. Withal he was frolicsome ; he played a large part in the 

 rackets which went on in our hall and was much in society, 

 where his eminent physical beauty made him welcome. At the 

 first tap of the war drum, he was away and by the time he was 

 twenty-two he commanded a brigade. I have heard it said that 

 he was the youngest man in the service to earn a star for his 

 shoulder. In 1865 he found no place in the regular army, but 

 fell into avocations where he won no credit and died. It is the 

 fashion to say that arms make a man fit for citizenship ; that is 

 in some measure true of the material which finds a place in the 

 ranks ; in my experience it is quite otherwise with youths of the 

 higher order there. In our Civil War the effect was usually de- 

 structive of purpose, and the training that fits man for it. 



There were two men much older than my set who were to be 

 connected with Agassiz's pupils who gave me a share of their 

 store, William Stimpson and Richard Wheatland. Wheatland 

 was a Salem man who came often to the laboratory and at 

 times worked with us for months, then would be away, for he 

 too was a consumptive, as were so many of the better sort in 

 those ancient days. From him I had a sense of the fundamental 

 measurement of the real Puritan stock of the Salem Colony; 

 through his eyes I first saw past the appalling solemnity which 



