He moved among all human contacts with unerring grace.  He was never the teacher, always the comrade.  It was his way to pretend that we knew far more than we did; so with perfect courtesy and gravity, he would ask our opinion on some matter of which we knew next to nothing; and we knew it was only his exquisiteness of good manners that impelled the habit; and we knew he knew the laughableness of it; yet we adored him for it.  He always suited his strength to our weakness; would tell us things almost with an air of apology for seeming to know more than we; pretending that we doubtless had known it all along, but it had just slipped our memory.  Marvellously he set us on our secret honour to do justice to this rare courtesy.  To fail him in some task he had set became, in our boyish minds, the one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man—­a discourtesy.  He was a man of the rarest and most delicate breeding, the finest and truest gentleman we had known.  Had he been nothing else, how much we would have learnt from that alone.

What a range, what a grasp, there was in his glowing, various mind!  How open it was on all sides, how it teemed with interests, how different from the scholar of silly traditional belief!  We used to believe that he could have taught us history, science, economics, philosophy—­almost anything; and so indeed he did.  He taught us to go adventuring among masterpieces on our own account, which is the most any teacher can do.  Luckiest of all were those who, on one pretext or another, found their way to his fireside of an evening.  To sit entranced, smoking one of his cigars,[*] to hear him talk of Stevenson, Meredith, or Hardy—­(his favourites among the moderns) to marvel anew at the infinite scope and vivacity of his learning—­this was to live on the very doorsill of enchantment.  Homeward we would go, crunching across the snow to where Barclay crowns the slope with her evening blaze of lights, one glimpse nearer some realization of the magical colours and tissues of the human mind, the rich perplexity and many-sided glamour of life.

[* It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked Robin Hood, that admirable 5-cent cigar, because the name, and the picture of an outlaw on the band, reminded him of the 14th century Ballads he knew by heart.]

It is strange (as one reviews all the memories of that good friend and master) to think that there is now a new generation beginning at Haverford that will never know his spell.  There is a heavy debt on his old pupils.  He made life so much richer and more interesting for us.  Even if we never explored for ourselves the fields of literature toward which he pointed, his radiant individuality remains in our hearts as a true exemplar of what scholarship can mean.  We can never tell all that he meant to us.  Gropingly we turn to little pictures in memory.  We see him crossing Cope Field in the green and gold of spring mornings, on his way to class.  We see him sitting