CHARACTERISTICS. 145 



This readiness of sympathy, combined with his vast 

 range of knowledge, gave a special geniality and charm to 

 his companionship, and enabled him as a teacher the better 

 to enter into the difficulties of his pupils. Looking back 

 on the precious half-hour before breakfast, which he always 

 devoted, even in his busiest days, to his sons' lessons, they 

 could recall the evident interest which he took in their 

 Latin and Greek, their Algebra and Geometry, for the sake 

 of the studies and the problems themselves. He seemed as 

 much at home in them as the masters who gave their lives 

 to them ; and the lad to whom it appeared only natural 

 that a grown-up person should deal easily with a school- 

 boy's work, found reason afterwards to marvel that the 

 mind, absorbed in other pursuits, could so readily unlock 

 the secrets of a different lore. He had the same intel- 

 lectual curiosity in manufactures, inventions, machinery, 

 processes of every sort. The newest scientific toy, the 

 zoetrope, the chameleon top, the radiometer, was sure to 

 appear upon his table. And his studies of things were 

 always supplemented by the studies of men. He read the 

 political memoirs of his own time with avidity, and could 

 turn on rills and streams of discourse on the. most un- 

 expected subject. ,The conversation once alighted, in some 

 party chiefly composed of young men, on the consti- 

 tutional history of Switzerland in the last century ; he 

 was immediately ready with a large store of facts, and 

 kept up the talk for three quarters of an hour. His 

 lectures in the same way seemed to proceed from an in- 

 exhaustible source. " When I look at that man's head," 

 said a Bristol organ-builder, " I cannot help wondering at 

 " the amount of knowledge it contains." He possessed a 

 power of mental classification, so he once told a friend, by 

 which, whenever he became acquainted with a new fact, it 

 arranged itself under its proper head, and was there ready 



