The bone-breaker crashed on and the stroke fell.  Sumner was called up before President Kirkland and received a reprimand.  He came from the faculty-room to the proctor’s apartment in a very boyish fit of tears, complaining between sobs that he was the victim of injustice, and upbraiding the proctor.  My father was short with him; he had brought it upon himself, the penalty was only reasonable, and it would be manly for him to take it good-naturedly.  Long afterward, when Sumner rose into great fame, my father remembered the incident perhaps too vividly.

My curiosity as to whether Mr. Sumner had any rankling in his heart from that old difference was at length gratified.  The years passed, the assault in the Senate Chamber by Brooks roused the whole country; then came the time of slow recovery.  Sumner had come back from the hands of Dr. Brown-Sequard at Paris to Boston, and was mustering strength to resume his great place.  Calling one day on a friend in Somerset Street, I found a visitor in the parlour, a powerful man weighed down by physical disability, whom I recognised as the sufferer whose name at the moment was uppermost in millions of hearts.

As he heard my name in the introduction which followed my entrance, he said quickly, while shaking my hand, “I wonder if you are the son of the man who reported me in college.”  The tone was not quite genial.  The old difference was not quite effaced.  I told him as sturdily as I could that I was the son of his old proctor and that I had often heard my father tell the story.  He said plainly he thought it unnecessary and unfair, and that that was the only time since his childhood when he had received a formal censure.  Long after, he received censure from the Massachusetts Legislature for an act greatly to his credit, the suggestion that the captured battle-flags should be returned to the Southern regiments from which they had been taken.

But it was only a momentary flash.  He settled back into the easy-chair with invalid languor, and began to tell me good-naturedly about his old velocipede, describing its construction, and the feats he had been able to perform on it, clumsy though it was.  He could keep up with a fast horse in riding into Boston, but at the cost of a good pair of shoes.  The contrivance supported the weight of the body, which rolled forward on the wheels, leaving the legs free to speed the machine by alternate rapid kicks.  From that he branched off into college athletics of his day in a pleasant fashion, and at the end of the not short interview I felt I had enjoyed a great privilege.

Another contact with Charles Sumner was a rather memorable one.  We were in the second year of the Civil War.  He was in his high place, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Senate, a main pillar of the Northern cause.  I meantime had been ordained as minister of a parish in the Connecticut valley, and was a zealous upholder of the cause of the Union.  John A. Andrew was Governor of Massachusetts.  I had come to know him through having preached in the church at Hingham with which he was connected.  He was superintendent of the Sunday-school, and had introduced me once for an address to his charge.  We were theologically in sympathy, but for me it was a closer bond that he was the great war Governor.