CHAPTER VIII 



SOME COLLEGE COMPANIONS 



NEXT to the elder men, my teachers, in the subjects which in- 

 terested me, I have to rank as helpers a number of persons 

 also a generation in advance of me who were only incidentally 

 my instructors. Of these, two or three were in the entourage 

 of Agassiz. One of them was Hansen, a Swede who served as 

 a translator of Scandinavian languages, Russian, or any other 

 foreign tongue save Latin, Greek, French, or German, which 

 we were expected to deal with as best we might. He was a very 

 interesting fellow, this Hansen, a huge blond Viking, with a 

 rare spirit in him. A lover of music and poetry, good at a song, 

 mingling gayly his age with our youths, all the day he was 

 merry, but at night he had the most frightful dreams. His room 

 was next to mine, and very often I had to go to his bed and 

 wrestle him to consciousness. His visitations had a demoniacal 

 fury and brought him a torment I have never known the like 

 of. When awakened he was in a state of sorrow that wrung 

 our hearts, but quickly he would cast his woe aside and be 

 his merry self again. Gradually I learned from his unconscious 

 speech, what I confirmed long afterwards from a person who 

 knew his history, that his wife and children had been burned 

 to death before his eyes. The daytime valor of this man taught 

 me much. 



We had as keeper of our club-house an interesting Scotch- 

 man, by the name of William Glenn, who was a preparator in 

 the Museum. Though a mechanic, he had been much about 

 museums and had known many naturalists in Great Britain. 

 He was, moreover, a disputatious philosopher of rather wide 

 reading in the Scotch school, concerning which we had endless 

 debates. Glenn's wife, an attractive lower-class elderly Scotch- 



