60 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



army, sought refuge there from the battle of the world, in which 

 they had been beaten. It was a rough-and-tumble school, made 

 up of some children from the garrison and a dozen or so lads 

 from town families. There I learned the elements of Latin, 

 Greek, and mathematics, acquired reluctantly with frequent 

 long absences, due to nervous illness and general insufficiency 

 of health. In my eleventh year these troubles began to take 

 the form of megrim, commonly known as sick headaches, a 

 torment which for fifty years sorely vexed my life. This malady, 

 the opprobrium of medical science, came to me by double in- 

 heritance, and on both sides of my house it had affected my 

 ancestors for at least three generations. For some years, until I 

 trained myself to go on with my work while suffering, these 

 visitations troubled me for at least two days in a fortnight. One 

 of the compensations of age is that they greatly diminish in fre- 

 quency and weight. After about three years in this school, 

 where I learned very little except the art of dodging duties, in 

 which I became fairly expert, in my fifteenth year my father 

 found a tutor for me, a German-Swiss clergyman, who had 

 wandered with his wife and children to this country in the 

 movement of 1848, and had been obdurately unsuccessful in his 

 efforts to establish himself in charge of a church. As, next after 

 my grandfather Southgate, this man had the most influence in 

 shaping my mind, in fact, the most of any in the passage 

 from youth to manhood, I shall now seek to give an account 

 of him. 



Johannes Escher was from eastern Zurich, of the well- 

 known family of that name. He was of moderate parts and 

 had been well credited at Heidelberg and Tubingen. Though 

 trained as a theologian, his bent was altogether towards philo- 

 sophy : he was a Hegelian with the curiously intense devotion to 

 the faith which characterized the followers of that master. His 

 absorption in his philosophical creed withdrew him from the 

 world, so that his interesting wife and attractive children seemed 

 remote from him. His only keen interest that remained in his 



