writing and debate and
hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or
some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while
we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow
suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in
plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the
order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had
come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had
no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant
guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when
Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow,
going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he
did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by
exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most
approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of
a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of
course, was an invention, but quite in character.

He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon
proprieties. "What will Barlow do next?" was always the question. In
the class-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound
scholarship was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could
bluff it with such _sang-froid_ and audacity. He kept his place
at the head of the class to the very end, but there Robert Treat
Paine came out precisely his equal. Among the many thousand marks
accumulating through four years the total for both men was exactly
alike--a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.

Before the Arsenal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that
had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the
Revolution. The grass and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and
lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer.
Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be
entertained. One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the
cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a
wide region and many a pane of glass was shivered. What had got into
the old cannon that night was long a mystery. Many years after Barlow
was discovered at the bottom of it--it was the first shot he ever
fired.

Dr. James Walker, the college president, said to a friend of mine at
the beg