286 SIR WILLIAM KAMSAY 



the audience was often convulsed with laughter. The 

 friends spent one day at Annapolis, and Ramsay was 

 so fascinated with it that he often said it was the place 

 of all he had ever seen in which he would best like to 

 have ended his life. By this time it was drawing near 

 the date of his first Lowell Lecture, so with many regrets 

 the Ramsays bade farewell to the Remsons and their 

 other Baltimore friends, and started for Boston, where 

 they took up their abode at the Somerset Hotel, and 

 settled down for the next three weeks. Perhaps 

 " settling down " is hardly the word to use, for two 

 nights a week were spent by Ramsay in the train between 

 Boston and New York, as he had been asked to give 

 a short course of lectures in Brooklyn, and he could only 

 do it by fitting them in between his Monday and Thurs- 

 day Lowell Lectures in Boston. He was a good traveller 

 and felt it no hardship, though he would have liked a 

 little more time for Boston social life. 



Ramsay's friendship with President Lowell, Professor 

 Lowell, the astronomer, and Professor Theodore Richards, 

 besides several other members of the Harvard staff 

 whose acquaintance he had made at the 250th anniver- 

 sary of the founding of the Royal Society, the summer 

 before, acted as an " open sesame " to that most exclusive 

 of circles, the intellectual world of Boston. Literary 

 as well as scientific doors were thrown open to the 

 Ramsays, and they saw a new and very different side 

 of American life. In a country where change and 

 progress are so much in evidence, Boston, where the old 



