had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse.  After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man.  The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye.  His dress and manner were simple, as of old.  He was entitled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious.  In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners.

It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership.  He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation.  Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all.  I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations.  It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits.  He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for.  It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion.  Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city.  The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic.  In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.

On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the flower-beds outside.  He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of animation.  It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists.  He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place.  I was soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the crowd of juniors which for a