Leo Lesquereux. — Orton. 285 
home. To scale the most difficult summits and to gather the 
rare flowers that grew there, were among his early ambitions 
and pleasures. He must have been a daring climber. On one 
of his excursions, wh.'n about ten years of age, he met with an 
accident of so dangerous a character that his escape from 
death seems almost incredible. He had climbed the moun- 
tain that towers above Fleurier, but by a misstep he fell over 
the edge of a cliff", down the steep mountain side. He struck 
first upon a projecting ledge and was rendered insensible by 
the fall ; from this point he rolled limp and unresisting, his 
descent being occasionally checked by branches of trees or 
shrubs, to the borders of the meadowland far below. When 
picked up there, he was found fearfully bruised and lacerated, 
but no bones were broken. For two week he lay unconscious, 
but at the end of six weeks he was on his feet again, the only 
permanent injury being a partial loss of hearing in one ear. 
The total deafness that overtook him in early manhood was 
no doubt connected in origin with this fearful fall. The coun- 
cil of the village had the Avonderful story entered on its records 
and the cliff" from which he fell was marked by a flag for a 
long time thereafter. 
At the age of thirteen he was sent to Neuchatel to begin his 
academic course. It was due altogether to his mother that he 
took this course, the lad himself preferring to remain at home 
and learn his father's trade. On entering school, child though 
he was, he was obliged to learn from the first the art of self- 
help. He earned enough to buy the books which he used by 
teaching pupils younger or less advanced than himself. 
Among his fellow students were two others to whom he was 
especially drawn, Arnold Guyot and August Agassiz, both of 
them of the same French Puritan stock to which he himself 
belonged. Louis Agassiz, an older brother of August, was now 
carrying forward his studies in the German universities, but 
was soon to return to Neuchatel as a professor. With Guyot 
in particular, young Lesquereux estabhshed the closest rela- 
tions of friendship and sympathy, which were terminated only 
by the death of the former in an honored old age. While stu- 
dents, they were inseparable in term time and vacation alike. 
The academic curriculum at Neuchatel was of the old type, as a 
matter of course. There was but one type known at this time 
it was mainly made up of the classical languages and litera- 
