term lined up before him once a week or so in Holden Chapel.  The small peculiarities of great men have an interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch.  I recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher’s head to a sky-light in the roof.  Gray’s utterance was rather hesitant.  He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile the article, “the-a, the-a, the-a,” his gaze meanwhile fixed upon the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and brightly illuminated.  The thought suggested was that he had a prompter on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true phrase.  For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the bottom of the well.  Though sometimes long in coming it was the right thing when it came and clothed his thought properly.  Sizing up the new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than their heads.  The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by a row of battered and muddy boot-soles.  His face fell; his whirling forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the obnoxious cowhide parapet.  “Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots”; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter.  Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many.  In calling us up he began with the A’s, following down the class in alphabetic regularity.  While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following.  In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the class.  Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it.  Nearly every man got the perfect mark.  This was a fiction.  The professor’s idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence and tricks.  If some men saw no use in botany, he would not waste time in beating it into them.  He left the blind and the sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps.  All such he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant.  In general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence as proceeding from him.  I think we had no teacher whom we at the last regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.