May, 1919 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, NOTES 105 
so she had, for one of my pets, perhaps finding my pantaloons pocket too warm 
for comfort, had climbed up under my jacket, and, sticking his head out of the 
nearest opening, was gazing steadily at my interlocutor and vibrating his 
tongue after the manner of snakes who seek to know what is going on about 
them. 
But my interest in things that walk, crawl or swim does not seem to me to 
explain satisfactorily my very particular interest in birds nor why, so far back 
as I can remember, I was always asking the names of birds and seeking infor- 
mation about their habits. I may add that such questionings availed me little, 
for in those days the man who knew the names of more than a half dozen com- 
mon birds was rare indeed, while books onthe subject, save Audubon, Wilson 
and Nuttall, were rarer still. What a Godsend to me a few years later was Vol- 
ume IX of the Pacific Railroad Reports and the Smithsonian Check List! And 
what an ornithologist I thought myself when, by its aid, I had memorized the 
scientific names of our common birds, till then, as it seemed to me, only half 
known, since known only by their vernacular names. 
FIRST MEETING WITH WILLIAM BREWSTER 
And so the years passed, as years have the habit of doing, slowly then, but, 
alas, how rapidly now, till the year 1865, when I entered the Cambridge High 
School to prepare for Harvard. Up to that time I had made a small collection 
of pinned butterflies and moths as so many boys do, and also had gathered the 
nucleus of a small collection of eggs. In endeavoring with the aid of a class- 
mate to establish the identity of a set of purple finch’s eggs, I stumbled on the 
fact that in our class was a boy by the name of William Brewster, who not only 
had a collection of birds and eggs, but who also knew how to ‘‘stuff’’ and 
mount birds. Now above all earthly things the ability to ‘‘stuff birds’’ seemed 
to me the most to be desired, but up to then I had met no one who had the art. 
Recess was a long time coming that morning, but come it did finally, and at 
once I made my way to a young fellow pointed out to me as Brewster, who was 
standing against the iron school fence with both arms extended along the rail- 
ing. I can see him now as I saw him then more than a half century ago. Boys 
are not apt to be very formal, and soon we were chatting about birds and their 
eggs. The subject of stuffing birds being broached, Brewster told me that he 
had already skinned, and planned to mount that afternoon, a ruddy duck, and, 
if I cared to see him work, I was welcome to come to his house. A _ trivial 
enough event our meeting was, as it seemed then, but it proved the prelude to 
a Close friendship which has continued for more than fifty years without break 
or misunderstanding, and is likely to continue to the end, or, perhaps, to put it 
in another way, to the beginning. 
Brewster had been studying birds, as well as collecting them, for several 
years, and what he had gathered already gave promise of becoming the finest 
private collection of birds, nests, and eggs ever gathered in this country. This 
collection, now numbering some forty thousand skins, as I write these lines, * 
being transferred as a gift to the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoolo: 
which it will permanently enrich. 
Almost at the start Brewster and I became intimate comrades, ? 
moment we could spare from our studies, including no doubt sor 
we could ill spare, were devoted to the hills, swamps, woods, ar 
Cambridge, Belmont, Waltham, and Concord. I doubt if loce 
