6 WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 



From the first moment of meeting in the empty warehouse of 

 the Normal College, which then served for a laboratory, we be- 

 came friends. He was of course much my senior, but there is no 

 other word which so well expresses the happy unconstrained feel- 

 ing that I felt towards him and that he showed towards me. It 

 had been settled that I was to live at Mr. Cock's boarding house, 

 across the creek, where the Brooks family had their quarters, and 

 we thus spent several weeks in constant intimacy. 



He was not the least like any one else I had ever known, and I 

 find it difficult to express the charm which his personality had 

 for me then, and has had increasingly since. He was, as I soon 

 found, on account of superficial eccentricities reputed a reserved 

 and rather inaccessible man. In general company he would 

 indeed often remain silent and I think he had moods in which 

 a morbid shyness would take complete possession of him, but once 

 at his ease he was another man. At such times he would talk 

 abundantly, but his speech was always that of the taciturn observer, 

 with the special, holding quality that the speech of such men has. 

 He spoke in short incisive phrases, full of novelty, suggestion, 

 and humorously inventive thought, sometimes, but not often, 

 rising to enthusiasm. I see him now, with his short, round fig- 

 ure, sitting on the piazza at Mr. Cock's or lying flat on his bed 

 a posture he often took when in a talking mood ruminating his 

 thoughts, which, if the truth must be told, were periodically in- 

 terrupted by his devotion to tobacco. What a strange combi- 

 nation it was! The grave, kindly face, the earnest solemnity of 

 philosophical speculation and the homely quid. Now, I suppose, 

 no university professor, however contemplative, dare use tobacco 

 in this particular way ; but I wonder if any university professor 

 ruminates spacious ideas as Brooks used to do, daily through 

 long vacant hours of leisure, to the delight and elevation of a 

 youthful listener. Those are the times of true education 



"when lofty thought 

 Lifts the young heart above its mortal lair." 



Many of Brooks' pupils must look back on similar pleasant 

 hours of intimate, informal summer laboratory life as critical 

 moments in their development. For myself I know that it was 



