The Days of a Man 1875 



or crown of gold, only for a chance at a place "on 

 the bleachers where ten thousand Hoosier poets 

 sit." * 



TWO Among my most valued friends in the state at 



friends } ar g e> I counted Dr. John Sloan of New Albany, a 

 large native of Maine, a man of friendly and attractive 

 personality, a fine type of the well-rounded country 

 doctor. Sloan devoted the leisure of a busy practice 

 of medicine to the study of the Natural History of 

 the Ohio Valley. He thus acquired a thorough 

 knowledge of birds and crayfishes, beetles and snails, 

 and in later years of bacteria, of which group of 

 organisms he prepared many slides; these, ac- 

 companied by slides of plant tissues, he presented 

 to the University of Indiana. 



William Dudley Foulke, whose delightful home at 

 Richmond I have at times visited, will appear in 

 later pages. 



At At the end of a fairly successful year in Indian- 



a P^ s > I went at tne request of Professor Shaler as 

 instructor in his "Harvard Summer School of 

 Geology" at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. On my 

 way to the Gap, for adventure's sake and accompa- 

 nied by a young engineer named Harper from 

 Purdue University, I took a cross-country tramp of 

 some days' duration. Coming upon a number of 

 backwoods baseball teams, we occasionally joined 

 in for a game, Harper as catcher, I as pitcher. The 

 possibility of throwing curved balls was just then 



1 A "bleacher" is an uncovered seat outside the grand stand at a baseball 

 game. "Hoosier" is a nickname of unknown origin applied to Indiana folk. 



n 1383 



