I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had deserted and cast off my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn.  A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my “leaving them” an unlooked-for emphasis.  The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment.  A little later Knopff was telling me of the old manuscripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by “de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages.”  He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection.  If he survived it was as one of the unbekannt, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.

As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle.  As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me.  I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friendship.

Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion.  Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton’s Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before.  Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere.  Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy.  “Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!” a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster.  But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp.  There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.

One pleasant afternoon a group of “divinities” (Ye gods, that that should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches.  Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low.  “By Holy Scripture,” broke out one, “a soft hand is a good thing.  A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath.”  The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum.  In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,—­indeed was capable of such things himself.