an orchestra whose members played in the Pierian Sodality.  The merriment of the lines was more robust than delicate, but with some pruning it passed.  The bill of announcement, which was hung up in the Pudding room, and which possibly is still preserved, was very elaborately and handsomely designed, and I think was the work of Alexander Agassiz, who had much skill of that kind.  The performers were all strenuous and some capable, but the hit of the evening was Phillips Brooks, who personated the giantess Glumdalca to perfection.  He was then nineteen, and had reached his full stature.  He was attired in flowing skirts and befitting bodice, and wore a towering head-dress of feather dusters or something similar, which swept the ceiling as he strode.  I had been cast originally for the Queen, but it was afterwards judged that I had special qualifications for the part of Princess.  Like the youths in Comus, my unrazored lips in those days were as smooth as Hebe’s, and I had a slenderness that was quite in keeping.  Dressed in an old brocade gown, an heirloom from the century before, with a lofty white wig, and proper patches upon my pink cheeks, I essayed the role of une belle dame sans merci.  Brooks and I were rivals for the affection of Tom Thumb, and I do not recall which succeeded.  The tragedy was most extreme.  In the closing scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with a picturesque heap of slain.  We were not so very dead, for the victims near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall, drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite accommodation.  The most impressive part of the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity.  The piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,—­and still again, at Chickering Hall in Boston.

Though Brooks could frolic upon occasion, his mood in his student days was prevailingly grave, and as he matured, warmed, and deepened into earnest religious conviction.  My own close association with him came to an end at our graduation.  Our respective fates led us in fields widely apart, and we met only at rare intervals.  Ten years after graduation we came together in a way for me memorable.  He was already held in the affectionate reverence of multitudes, and perhaps established in the position in which he so long stood as the most moving and venerated of American preachers.  At the commemoration for the Harvard soldiers, in 1865, he was the chaplain, and his prayer shares with the Commemoration Ode of Lowell the admiration of men as an utterance especially uplifting.  My humble function on that day was to speak for the rank and file, and Brooks and I, as classmates, sat elbow to elbow at the table under the great tent.  He was charmingly genial and brotherly.