eecher asked me how much it would cost
you to have me come to him each week. I told him, and then he sent me
away."

That was Henry Ward Beecher!

Edward Bok was in the formative period between boyhood and young manhood
when impressions meant lessons, and associations meant ideals. Mr.
Beecher never disappointed. The closer one got to him, the greater he
became--in striking contrast to most public men, as Edward had already
learned.

Then, his interests and sympathies were enormously wide. He took in so
much! One day Edward was walking past Fulton Market, in New York City,
with Mr. Beecher.

"Never skirt a market," the latter said; "always go through it. It's the
next best thing, in the winter, to going South."

Of course all the marketmen knew him, and they knew, too, his love for
green things.

"What do you think of these apples, Mr. Beecher?" one marketman would
stop to ask.

Mr. Beecher would answer heartily: "Fine! Don't see how you grow them.
All that my trees bear is a crop of scale. Still, the blossoms are
beautiful in the spring, and I like an apple-leaf. Ever examine one?"
The marketman never had. "Well, now, do, the next time you come across
an apple-tree in the spring."

And thus he would spread abroad an interest in the beauties of nature
which were commonly passed over.

"Wonderful man, Beecher is," said a market dealer in green goods once.
"I had handled thousands of bunches of celery in my life and never
noticed how beautiful its top leaves were until he picked up a bunch
once and told me all about it. Now I haven't the heart to cut the leaves
off when a customer asks me."

His idea of his own vegetable-gardening at Boscobel, his Peekskill home,
was very amusing. One day Edward was having a hurried dinner,
preparatory to catching the New York train. Mr. Beecher sat beside the
boy, telling him of some things he wished done in Brooklyn.

"No, I thank you," said Edward, as the maid offered him some potatoes.

"Look here, young man," said Mr. Beecher, "don't pass those potatoes so
lightly. They're of my own raising--and I reckon they cost me about a
dollar a piece," he added with a twinkle in his eye.

He was an education in so many ways! One instance taught Edward the
great danger of passionate speech that might unconsciously wound, and
the manliness of instant recognition of the error. Swayed by an
occasion, or by the responsiveness of an audience, Mr. Beecher would
sometimes say somethin