own-hill to
his own quarters with a lantern, he denounced me for the musty and
mouldy and generally ignoble academicism of my character. Never before
or since, I fancy, has the air of the Adirondack wilderness vibrated
more repugnantly to a vocable than it did that night to the word
"academicism."

Yet Davidson himself was always essentially a teacher. He must give
forth, inspire, and have the young about him. After leaving Boston for
Europe and Africa, founding the Fellowship of the New Life in London
and New York (the present Fabian Society in England is its offshoot),
he hit upon the plan which pleased him best of all when, in 1882 or
thereabouts, he bought a couple of hundred acres on East Hill, which
closes the beautiful Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, on the north, and
founded there, at the foot of Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore"
and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences." Although the primeval
forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still
sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and
the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson
showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him,
in organizing his settlement. He built a number of cottages pretty in
design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for
effect. He turned a couple of farm buildings which were on the grounds
into a lecturing place and a refectory; and there, arriving in early
April and not leaving till late in November, he spent the happiest part
of all his later years, surrounded during the summer months by
colleagues, friends, and listeners to lectures, and in the spring and
fall by a few independent women who were his faithful friends, and who
had found East Hill a congenial residence.

Twice I went up with T. D. to open the place in April. I remember
leaving his fireside one night with three ladies who were also early
comers, and finding the thermometer at 8 degrees Fahrenheit and a
tremendous gale blowing the snow about us. Davidson loved these
blustering vicissitudes of climate. In the early years the brook was
never too cold for him to bathe in, and he spent days in rambling over
the hills and up the glens and through the forest.

His own cottage was full of books whose use was free to all who visited
the settlement. It stood high on a hill in a grove of silver-birches
and looked upon the Western Mountains; and it al