yet we adored him for it. He always suited his strength to our
weakness; would tell us things almost with an air of apology for
seeming to know more than we; pretending that we doubtless had known
it all along, but it had just slipped our memory. Marvellously he
set us on our secret honour to do justice to this rare courtesy. To
fail him in some task he had set became, in our boyish minds, the
one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man--a discourtesy.
He was a man of the rarest and most delicate breeding, the finest
and truest gentleman we had known. Had he been nothing else, how
much we would have learnt from that alone.

What a range, what a grasp, there was in his glowing, various mind!
How open it was on all sides, how it teemed with interests, how
different from the scholar of silly traditional belief! We used to
believe that he could have taught us history, science, economics,
philosophy--almost anything; and so indeed he did. He taught us to
go adventuring among masterpieces on our own account, which is the
most any teacher can do. Luckiest of all were those who, on one
pretext or another, found their way to his fireside of an evening.
To sit entranced, smoking one of his cigars,[*] to hear him talk of
Stevenson, Meredith, or Hardy--(his favourites among the moderns)
to marvel anew at the infinite scope and vivacity of his
learning--this was to live on the very doorsill of enchantment.
Homeward we would go, crunching across the snow to where Barclay
crowns the slope with her evening blaze of lights, one glimpse
nearer some realization of the magical colours and tissues of the
human mind, the rich perplexity and many-sided glamour of life.

[* It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked _Robin
Hood_, that admirable 5-cent cigar, because the name, and the
picture of an outlaw on the band, reminded him of the 14th
century Ballads he knew by heart.]

It is strange (as one reviews all the memories of that good friend
and master) to think that there is now a new generation beginning at
Haverford that will never know his spell. There is a heavy debt on
his old pupils. He made life so much richer and more interesting for
us. Even if we never explored for ourselves the fields of literature
toward which he pointed, his radiant individuality remains in our
hearts as a true exemplar of what scholarship can mean. We can never
tell all that he meant to us. Gropingly we turn to little pic