is foot had touched firm land. The first
term under the doctor brought up every intellectual faculty I
possessed, and I suppose it was to this intense appreciation of his
leading that I owed his friendship and partiality in the following
years. So far as the influence of school can go, I owe to him the best
of my education, and especially the perception of the meaning of the
word itself. In the senior year I turned back in my life and sought
not to hasten, but to linger in the precincts of study, and the
imperious necessity of getting to the only occupation which would give
me the independence I desired, alone deterred me from a post-graduate
course of study to compensate for the inadequacy of the past years.

In entering the church, Dr. Nott had deprived the world of a statesman
of no ordinary calibre, but in the eyes of the Protestant, as of the
Catholic Church, in the country which had its precedents to make, as
in that which had precedents a thousand years old, the maxim, "once a
priest always a priest," kept him in the pulpit, to which he had no
irresistible call, and to which the accident of his career only had
led him. Had the church to which he belonged been organized with an
episcopal government, he had certainly been its primate; but in the
vague and incoherent condition of the Congregational churches, to one
of which he belonged, there was no career beyond that of the isolated
pastorate of a single congregation. In this insufficiency of interest
for an active and influential life there was only the educational
calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this
he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in
libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will
not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical
inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature;
the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal
combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications
as the greatest teacher of young men of his generation.

Nobody could know him except the pupils to whom he disclosed himself,
and to whom his kindly and magnanimous nature was unreservedly open,
and they were few, and the list is fast being canceled; when we are
gone, no one will ever comprehend how he could have been what he
was. But the power he always exercised over his favorite boys was
extraordinary; any of us would have done any