the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true
phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the
bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right
thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the
new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some
unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which
Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs
and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than
their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the
sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by
a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling
forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the
obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those
boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous
clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite
among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he
began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity.
While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to
open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold
it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page
following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so
on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared
he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect
mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old
enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish
negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would
not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the
sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands
for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps. All such
he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and
our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In
general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence
as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last
regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an
indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.

Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its
foundations in a re-shaping at the han