THE YOUNG JOHN FISKE 187 



Hall was abandoned; there were too few left to keep it up. 

 For a while we followed the plan of getting a dinner at a board- 

 ing-house kept by a motherly old woman, a Miss McGee. It 

 stood on the site now occupied by St. John's Chapel on Brattle 

 Street. To it most of Agassiz's pupils resorted, as did some of 

 his assistants. 



I think it was at this time, in the autumn of 1861, that for a 

 while I took my dinner at the Brattle House, then a forlorn 

 kind of hotel where a few students went ; afterward it was the 

 University Press ; like many another edifice of that time, it has 

 vanished. At my table there was only one other person, a shy 

 fellow of about my age with whom I tried in vain to make 

 effective acquaintance. I took a fancy to him as I thought he 

 did to me, but his diffidence was a bar. I learned that his name 

 was Green, and that he came from New York way. I was piqued 

 by my unaccustomed failure to get on with a chap I fancied, 

 but I soon forgot all about him. Twenty years after when at 

 a club dinner I was holding forth on the evils of self-conscious- 

 ness, I described my experience with Green, presenting him 

 as a gangling, red-headed, freckle-faced, goggle-eyed chap, who 

 blushed whenever he was spoken to, who had probably been 

 shamed out of activities through his preposterous sense of him- 

 self. Then John Fiske, who had been leaning across the table 

 evidently admiring the droll picture of the vaunted Green, said, 

 "Why, that was me!" Then it came out, what I had not before 

 known, that for family reasons he had changed his name, and 

 with it, it seemed, his very nature ; for I could not find save in 

 his intelligence a trace of Green in Fiske. I saw many wonderful 

 changes in my friends who went into the Civil War, swiftly 

 evolved in the intense environment to which they were sub- 

 jected, but none equal to that which had transmuted the soft and 

 callow youth to my solid and permanently substantial friend. 



After a time, we Southerners, half a dozen in number, found 

 that we could save still further by cooking all our meals in our 

 rooms, and for some months we followed this plan. The result 



