meetings I have ever known
have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each
with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last
have come out on common ground.

Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially
interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and
Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service
when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when
only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well
a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the
river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were
arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.

Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it
impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for
the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and
still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was
forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a
clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign
of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for
a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but
I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard
brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards
recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only
a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He
survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident
of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to
walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage
by reverent friends.

Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had
been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother
was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women
of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the
sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar
of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that
fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the
battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the
father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the
old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, bu