How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical battle-fields were to be put to splendid use.  He proved to be a nearly perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that could be added to Lowell.  To us he seems one of the manliest of men, thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts.  In Edward Emerson’s charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under him before he came to death himself.  He studied their characters as if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the particular lovable traits each one showed—­these mute companions who stood so closely by him in life and death.

When our class first assembled in 1851 there was a slight boy of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow.  He was inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest.  Barlow came admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study to take a leading place.  As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics.  I remember his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored away.  Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for honours with men so well equipped.  We perhaps magnified the gifts and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed.  Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholarship, and the nonchalance with which he always won in the classrooms was a constant marvel.  He had a queer way of turning serious things into fun.  With a freshman desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the “Glorious Apollers” or some such organisation.  At an early meeting of the society, while we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in plumes and draperies.  He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part.  He danced and paraded before the conclave and had no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious.  It was said that Barlow, going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing.  The story, of course, was an invention, but quite in character.