6 
WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 
From the first moment of meeting in the empty warehouse of 
the Normal College, which then served for a laboratory, we be- 
came friends. He was of course much my senior, but there is no 
other word which so well expresses the happy unconstrained feel- 
ing that I felt towards him and that he showed towards me. It 
had been settled that I was to live at Mr. Cock's boarding house, 
across the creek, where the Brooks family had their quarters, and 
we thus spent several weeks in constant intimacy. 
He was not the least like any one else I had ever known; and I 
find it difficult to express the charm which his personality had 
for me then, and has had increasingly since. He was, as I soon 
found, on account of superficial eccentricities reputed a reserved 
and rather inaccessible man. In general company he would 
indeed often remain silent and I think he had moods in which 
a morbid shyness would take complete possession of him, but once 
at his ease he was another man. At such times he would talk 
abundantly, but his speech was always that of the taciturn observer, 
with the special, holding quality that the speech of such men has. 
He spoke in short incisive phrases, full of novelty, suggestion, 
and humorously inventive thought, sometimes, but not often, 
rising to enthusiasm. I see him now, with his short, round fig- 
ure, sitting on the piazza at Mr. Cock's or lying flat on his bed — 
a posture he often took when in a talking mood — ruminating his 
thoughts, which, if the truth must be told, were periodically in- 
terrupted by his devotion to tobacco. What a strange combi- 
nation it was! The grave, kindly face, the earnest solemnity of 
philosophical speculation and the homely quid. Now, I suppose, 
no university professor, however contemplative, dare use tobacco 
in this particular way : but I wonder if any university professor 
ruminates spacious ideas as Brooks used to do, daily through 
long vacant hours of leisure, to the delight and elevation of a 
youthful listener. Those are the times of true education 
"when lofty thought 
Lifts the young heart above its mortal lair." 
Many of Brooks' pupils must look back on similar pleasant 
hours of intimate, informal summer laboratory life as critical 
moments in their development. For myself I know that it was 
