ACQUAINTANCE WITH GORDON McKAY 327 



LICHFIELD, March 9, 1884. 



I came back here yesterday as I am sure of something to eat and a room 

 to myself. I have made pretty good headway with the work laid out and 

 hope to paddle homewards on Wednesday. I go to-night to [word illegible] 

 and thence six miles to look up some matters. I shall have a trustworthy 

 companion, so you need not worry yourself about me. This section, though 

 settled for near a century, is still a pathless wilderness, with only here and 

 there an acre of better land. The people are incorrigibly lazy and shiftless. 



I am keeping quite well despite bad food and a good deal of work on horse- 

 back. 



My old coat is going like the parson's "one-hoss shay," all at once and 

 nothing first. So I shall be driven to shelter or shirtsleeves soon. 



This is a [word illegible] land and a very uninteresting people, swampy, 

 saturnine fellows, no life, no sparkle except the effervescence of whiskey. 

 I really have but little confidence in any great future for our race in thi3 

 shape. It must mend or make itself into nothingness. . . . 



To his mother: 



CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 22, 1884. 



. . . You cannot imagine how glad we are to hear that you have really 

 had your profit from your dreadful siege with the doctors. God bless them. 

 I have been all day with my friend McKay, who has been enduring a fit of 

 the stone (kidney form). His agony has been frightful. I have given him 

 near two pints of ether in eight hours with only momentary effects. Now 

 he is over it, but exhausted. . . . 



I am enjoying "hay cold." There is not much fun in the crop. . . . lam 

 much obliged to Anna for her kind letters; that I don't answer them more 

 regularly is due to the fact that the days are short and busy with me. It is 

 a chance to keep from under the wheels of time. 



Since Mr. Gordon McKay was destined, at a later period, to 

 play so large a part in Mr. Shaler's life and in that of the Uni- 

 versity, the above allusion to him would seem to call for a word 

 of explanation. Mr. Shaler's acquaintance with Mr. McKay, 

 one of Harvard's greatest benefactors, began in 1865, and from 

 that time on he knew him intimately until Mr. McKay's death 

 in 1903. Indeed he somewhere says he never knew any man 

 so well or so long. For many years they were very close neigh- 

 bors, and at first were drawn together by the mutual interest 



