I had at Port Royal a long and friendly talk with Isaac I. Stevens.  He was already a man of note.  After achieving the highest honours at West Point he had gone to the West, and in the great unexplored Pacific Northwest had conquered, built, and systematised until a fair foundation was laid for the fine civilisation which now sixty years later has been reared upon it.  He was modest in his bearing, with well-knit and sinewy frame, and possessed at the same time refined manners and a taste for the higher things of life.  Before the year had passed, his life went out in the second battle of Bull Run.  In the end of that terrible campaign, he essayed with Phil Kearny to stem at Chantilly the rush of Stonewall Jackson upon Washington.  The attempt was successful, but Stevens died waving the colours at the head of his men.  It is said that Lincoln had marked him for the command of the Army of the Potomac.  He had made good in all previous positions, and perhaps would have made good in the chief place, but here I stumble once more upon a might-have-been and am silent.

Dear ghosts of old-time friends swarm in my thought as I dream of those days.  The white marbles in Memorial Chapel solemnly bear the names of Harvard’s Civil War soldiers and tell how they died.  There was one of whom I might say much, an elder companion, a wise and pleasant spirit who did something toward my shaping for life.  A cannon-ball at Cold Harbor was the end for him.  There was another, a brilliant, handsome young Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North.  He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment.  He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day’s work which must not be shirked.  I have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in our last interview.  “Dress-parade at six o’clock; come over and see the dress-paradoes!” He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he passed.

There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other side:  McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in Virginia; W.H.F.  Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles.  It helped me much a few years ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old Confederates “Rooney” Lee and I had in our youth been college mates.  My classmate J.B.  Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow who had small basis of scholarship, perhaps, but a marked power for effective utterance.  He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency, and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the class oration.  He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years.  He enlisted