man’s horse.  Thus talking, the landlord pointed out Percival, surrounded by a group of villagers, who, quietly, and under pretence of conversation, were holding him under a sort of arrest.  The Doctor rushed into the circle, addressed his friend Percival by name, spoke of the survey, and thus satisfied the bystanders, who, guessing their mistake, dispersed silently.  No open remonstrance was needed, and perhaps Percival never understood the adventure in which he thus unconsciously formed the principal character.

While we were in Berlin, the native town of Percival, he related to me several incidents of his earlier life.  His father was discussing some geographical question with a neighbor; and the future geologist, then a boy of seven or eight, sat by listening until the ignorance of his elders tempted him to speak.  “Where did you learn that?” they asked, in astonishment.  With timid reluctance, he confessed that he had been reading clandestinely Morse’s large geography, of which there was a copy in a society-library kept at his father’s house.  The book, he added, had an indescribable attraction for him; and even at that almost infantile age he was familiar with its contents.  It was this reading of Morse, perhaps, which determined his taste for those geographical studies in which he subsequently became so distinguished.  With him, as with Humboldt and Guyot, geography was a term of wide signification.  Far from confining it to the names and boundaries of countries, seas, and lakes, to the courses of rivers and the altitudes of mountains, he connected with it meteorology, natural history, and the leading facts of human history, ethnology, and archaeology.  He knew London as thoroughly as most Americans know New York or Philadelphia, and yet he had never crossed the Atlantic.

An instance of the minuteness of his geographical information was related to me by the Rev. Mr. Adam, a Scottish clergyman, long resident at Benares, but subsequently settled over the Congregational Church in Amherst, Massachusetts.  On his way to visit me at New Haven, he met in the stage-coach a countryman of his, who soon opened a controversy with him respecting the course of a certain river in Scotland.  The discussion had continued for some time, when another passenger offered a suggestion which opened the eyes of the debaters to the fact (not unfrequently the case in such controversies) that they were both wrong.  “How long since you were there, Sir?” they asked; and the reply was, “I never was in Scotland.”  “Who are you, Sir?” Mr. Adam wanted to ask, but kept the question until he could put it to me.  I did not feel much hesitation in telling him that the stranger must have been Percival; and Percival it was, as I afterwards learned by questioning him of the circumstance.