ad not sufficient
soul-caloric to make her forget her Isaac.

This friendship with Mary Story is often spoken of as the one
love-affair in the life of Sir Isaac Newton. It was all prosily Platonic
on his part, but as Mary lived out her life at Grantham, and Sir Isaac
Newton used to go there occasionally, and when he did, always called
upon her, the relationship was certainly noteworthy.

The only break in that lifelong friendship occurred when each was past
fifty.

Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was
seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray,
and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat
talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic
equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he
absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence. As the tobacco
died low, he gazed about for a convenient utensil to use in pushing the
ashes down in the bowl of his pipe. Looking down he saw the lady's hand
resting upon his knee, and he straightway utilized the forefinger of his
vis-a-vis. A suppressed feminine screech followed, but the fires of
friendship were not quenched by so slight an incident, which Mrs.
Vincent knew grew out of temperament, and not from wrong intent.

She lived to be eighty-five, and to the day of her death caressed the
scar--the cicatrice of a love-wound. All of which seems to prove that
old women can be quite as absurd as young ones--goodness me!

* * * * *

When Isaac was eighteen, Master Stokes was so well impressed with his
star scholar that he called in the young lad's uncle, the Reverend Mr.
Ayscough, and insisted that the boy be sent to Cambridge. The uncle
being a Cambridge man himself thought this the proper thing to do.

On June Fifth, Sixteen Hundred Sixty-one, Isaac presented his
credentials from his uncle and Mr. Stokes, and was duly entered in
Trinity College as a subsizar, which means that he was admitted on
suspicion. A part of the duties of a subsizar was to clean boots, scrub
floors and perform various other delightful tasks which everybody else
evaded.

To be at Trinity College in any capacity was paradise for this boy. He
thirsted for knowledge: to know, to do, to perform--these things were
his desire. He had been brought up to work, anyway, and to a country boy
toil is no punishment. "I knew that if worse came to worst I could get
work in t