challenge, repartee,—­all were quick and happy, and from time to time in soberer vein he passed over without shock into befitting dignity.  I have sat at many a banquet, but for me that ruling of the feast by Winthrop is the masterpiece in that kind.  He lived long after retiring from politics, the main stay of causes charitable, educational, and for civic betterment.  My memory is enriched by the image of him which it holds.

* * * * *

Sixty years ago, one met, under the elms of the streets of Cambridge, two men who plainly were close friends:  one of moderate height, well groomed in those days almost to the point of being dapper, very courteous, bowing low to every student he met, Henry W. Longfellow.  Of him I shall have something to say later on.  The other was a man of unusual stature and stalwart frame, with a face and head of marked power.  His rich brown hair lay in heavy locks; the features were patrician.  He would have been handsome but for an hauteur about the eyes not quite agreeable.  His presence was commanding, not genial.  It was Charles Sumner.

I often encountered the two men in those days, receiving regularly the poet’s sunny recognition and the statesman’s rather unsympathetic stare.  Both men were overwhelmingly famous, but, touched simultaneously by warmth and frost, I, a shy youngster, could keep my balance in their presence.  Sumner in those years was the especial bete noire of the South and the conservative North, and the idol of the radicals—­at once the most banned and the most blessed of men.  I had, besides, a personal reason for looking upon him with interest.  He was a man with whom my father had once had a sharp difference, and I wondered, as I watched the stride of the stately Senator down the street, if he remembered, as my father did, that difference of twenty-five years before.

My father, in the late twenties a divinity student at Harvard, was a proctor, living in an entry of Stoughton Hall, for the good order of which he was expected to care.  The only man he ever reported was Charles Sumner, and this was my father’s story.

Sumner, an undergraduate, though still a boy, had nearly attained his full stature and weight.  He was athletic in his tastes, and given to riding the velocipede of those days, a heavy, bonebreaking machine, moved not by pedals but by thrusting the feet against the ground.  This Sumner kept in his room, carrying it painfully up the stairs, and practised on it with the result, his size and energy being so unusual, that the building, solid as it was, was fairly shaken, to the detriment of plaster and woodwork, and the complete wreck of the proper quiet of the place.  My father remonstrated mildly, but without effect.  A second more emphatic remonstrance was still without effect, whereupon came an ultimatum.  If the disturbance continued, the offender would be reported to the college authorities.