ly into
all our sports, but preferred fishing, sailing, and swimming to our
rougher harder amusements. He drew excellently, landscape and marine
views and figures. He was a healthy, active boy, and could beat us all
in running. I have said his was a quick temper, but it was a forgiving
one. If he laughed not as loud and often as many of us, he caused us to
laugh oftener than any, for he had a quick dry humour and witty tongue.
When it came to chaffing, he was always conqueror.

My brother Drake was entirely unlike Alfred Higginson. He was a hardy,
rough, jolly boy, overflowing with fun and animal life, what is called a
"regular boy." Never quiet--laughing, singing, whistling all the time,
heels over head in everything, pitching into his studies as
irrepressibly as into his games, but with more success in the latter,
though he was a fair student; better in his mathematics and other
English studies than in the languages. The only reading he cared for
was that of travel and adventure, voyages of whalemen and discoveries,
histories of pirates, Indian scenes, hunting stories, war histories,
Walter Scott's novels, "Gulliver's Travels," and the unequalled
"Robinson Crusoe." Everything he could find about the Crusaders he
revelled in, and even went at Latin with a rush when, Caesar and Nepos
being put aside, the dramatic narrative of Virgil opened to him, and the
adventures of the Trojan heroes became his daily lesson. But that he
had to feed his interest, crumb by crumb, painfully gathered by
dictionary and grammar, made him chafe. He enjoyed it, though, with all
of us, when, after each day's recitation--after we boys had marred and
blurred the elegance and spirit of Virgil's eloquence with all sorts of
laboured, limping translations, that made Mr Clare fairly writhe in his
chair--our tutor would drop a word of commendation for Walter's better
rendering of the poem, and then read the lesson himself, and go over in
advance the one for the next day. Then the ribs and decks of our
schoolroom in the wrecked brig melted away as the scenes of the Aeneid
surrounded us. The dash of the waves we heard was on the Trojan shore,
or the coast of Latium, as we wandered with storm-tossed Aeneas. Or we
walked the splendid court of Dido, or were contending in battle with the
warlike Turnus for our settlement in Latium. Turnus and the fierce
Mezentius were Drake's favourites. He never liked Aeneas, who was
always Alfred Higginson