When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw then that Dredge’s emotion was a tribute to the great man’s proximity.  That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch.  Archie, always enthusiastic but vague, had said:  “Oh, he’s a tremendous chap—­you’ll see—­” but I hadn’t expected to see quite so clearly.  Lanfear’s vision, of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried Dredge off to the Biological Station.  And that was the way it began.

Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister.  He comes from East Lethe, New York State, and was working his way through college—­waiting at White Mountain hotels in summer—­when Archie Lanfear ran across him.  There were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid.  Dredge never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother wanted him to be a scholar, and “kept at him,” as he put it, in the hope of his going back to “teach school” at East Lethe.  He developed slowly, as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard’s Bay.  But he had read Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation,” and had always been a patient and curious observer of nature.  And his first meeting with Lanfear explained him to himself.  It didn’t, however, enable him to explain himself to others, and for a long time he remained, to all but Lanfear, an object of incredulity and conjecture.

“_ Why_ my husband wants him about—­” poor Mrs. Lanfear, the kindest of women, privately lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that time—­they kept him all summer at the bungalow—­had one of the most encumbering personalities you can imagine.  He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive:  one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.

The poor Lanfears almost died of him that summer, and the pity of it was that he never suspected it, but continued to lavish on them a floundering devotion as uncomfortable as the endearments of a dripping dog—­all out of gratitude for the Professor’s kindness!  He was full, in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any one who would listen when his first shyness had worn off.  You can’t picture him spouting sentimental poetry, can you?  Yet I’ve seen him petrify a whole group of Mrs. Lanfear’s callers by suddenly discharging on them, in the strident drawl of Western New York, “Barbara Frietchie” or “The Queen of the May.”  His taste in literature was uniformly bad, but very definite, and far more assertive than his views on biological questions.  In his scientific judgments he showed, even then, a remarkable temperance, a precocious openness to the opposite view; but in literature he was a furious propagandist, aggressive, disputatious, and extremely sensitive to adverse opinion.