EDUCATOR | 87 



with his tastes, his work would have been very confining 

 and laborious. But his tastes were literary rather than 

 scientific. It is doubtful whether he really enjoyed any of 

 the sciences, with the single exception of botany; but the 

 work he did enabled him to grasp something more than the 

 rudiments of the sciences as taught in the ordinary college 

 course, and to understand the interdependence of the 

 sciences and their federal relations to each other. This was 

 of great importance to him in after life. It was a hard school, 

 but no other could have better prepared him for his future 

 work. It was with sufficient cause that Amherst College 

 conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of 

 Laws in 1891. 



While discharging these various duties he acted as sec- 

 retary of his own class (the Class of '62 in Amherst Col- 

 lege), and published in 1872 a little booklet giving an ac- 

 count of all who had ever been connected with the class, 

 telling how far each had advanced in the ten years since 

 graduation in professional, commercial and matrimonial 

 life. It was a tedious bit of work. His own description 

 of the booklet is correct so far as the history of each one 

 is concerned. "I have brought you up from the 'mewl- 

 ing infant in the nurse's arms' to 'the lover sighing like a 

 furnace, with a woful ballad to his mistress's eyebrow.' : 

 But while his story of each one was told with fidelity and 

 accuracy, his way of telling it was characteristic, both of 

 himself and of the person of whom he wrote. In writing of 

 one who had a genius for getting conditioned at the end 

 of every term in Latin and Greek, he says: "He studied di- 

 vinity, wrestling with the Hebrew, and prevailing mightily 

 with the Greek." He gave the statistics of the professions 



