He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon proprieties.  “What will Barlow do next?” was always the question.  In the class-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound scholarship was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could bluff it with such sang-froid and audacity.  He kept his place at the head of the class to the very end, but there Robert Treat Paine came out precisely his equal.  Among the many thousand marks accumulating through four years the total for both men was exactly alike—­a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.

Before the Arsenal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the Revolution.  The grass and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer.  Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be entertained.  One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a wide region and many a pane of glass was shivered.  What had got into the old cannon that night was long a mystery.  Many years after Barlow was discovered at the bottom of it—­it was the first shot he ever fired.

Dr. James Walker, the college president, said to a friend of mine at the beginning of the war, speculating on the probable futures of the boys who had been under his care, “There’s Barlow, now he’ll go in and come out at the top.”  Barlow had been a sad puzzle to the faculty, good men, often perplexed to know what to do with him or what would become of him.  Dr. Walker’s astuteness divined well the outcome.  As I review those early years I can see now that Barlow then gave plain signs of the qualities which he was later to display.  I remember sleeping with him once in a room in the top story of Stoughton in our sophomore year and he talked for a great part of the night about Napoleon.  The Corsican was the hero who beyond all others had fascinated him, whose career he would especially love to emulate.  We were a pair of boys in a peaceful college, living in a time which apparently would afford no opportunity for a soldier’s career.  I have often thought of that talk.  Barlow was really not unlike the youthful Napoleon, in frame he was slender and delicate, his complexion verged toward the olive, his face was always beardless.  I never saw him thrown off his poise in any emergency.  The straits of course are not great in which a college boy is placed, but such as they were, Barlow was always cool, with his mind working at its best in the midst of them.  He was never abashed, but had a resource and an apt one in every emergency.  He was absolutely intrepid before the thrusts of our sharpest examiners and as I have said could bluff it boldly and dexterously where his knowledge failed; then the odd cynicism with which he turned down great pretentions and sometimes