It was not quite true.  There was one, and only one, member of the class of ’54 who was as small as I. Some consolation, though not much, in that!  But the air of amused compassion with which the lusty Down-Easter, who had made me feel what the digito monstrari was, now looked down on me, raised a feeling of resentment and self-depreciation which left me in no mood to make a brilliant show of scholarship in construing my “Isocrates” that morning.

“True, I am small, nay, diminutive,” I soliloquized, as I wended my way homeward under the classic umbrage of venerable elms.  “But surely this is no fault of mine.—­Hold there!  Are you quite sure it’s no fault of yours?  Are we not responsible to a much greater extent than we imagine for our physical condition?  After making all abatement for insurmountable hereditary influences upon organization,—­after granting to that remorseless law of genealogical transmission its proper weight,—­after admitting the seemingly capricious facts of what the modern French physiologists call atavism, under which we are made drunkards or consumptives, lunatics or wise men, short or tall, because of certain dominant traits in some remote ancestor,—­after conceding all this, does not Nature leave it largely in our own power to counteract both physical and moral tendencies, and to mould the body as well as the mind, if we will only put forth in action the requisite energy of will?”

This disposition to cavil at received axioms has beset me through life.  No sooner does a truth present itself than I want to see it on its other side.  If I hear the Devil spoken ill of, I puzzle myself to find what can be said in his favor.  The man who thus halts between conflicting opinions, solicitous to give both their due, and to see the truth, pure and simple and entire, may miss laying hold of great convictions till it is too late for him to act on them; but what he accepts he generally holds.

My meditations on the subject of my inferior stature led me to a determination to try what gymnastic practice could do to remedy the defect.  For some thirty years, gymnastics, first introduced into this country, I believe, at the Round-Hill School at Northampton, then under the charge of Messrs. Cogswell and Bancroft, had languished and revived fitfully at Cambridge.  It was during one of the languishing periods that I began my practice.  For some five or six weeks I kept it up with enthusiasm.  Then I began to grow less methodical and regular in my habits of exercise; and then to find excuses for my delinquencies.

After all, what matter, if, like Paul’s, my “bodily presence is weak”?  Were not Alexander the Great and Napoleon small men?  Were not Pope, and Dr. Watts, and Moore, and Campbell, and a long list of authors, artists, and philosophers, considerably under medium height?  Were not Garrick and Kean and the elder Booth all under five feet four or five?  Is there not a volume somewhere in our college library, written by a learned Frenchman, devoted exclusively to the biography of men who have been great in mind, though diminutive in stature?  Is not Lord John Russell as small almost as I?  Have I many inches to grow before I shall be as tall as Dr. Holmes?