* * * * *

Sixty years ago, one met, under the elms of the streets of Cambridge,
two men who plainly were close friends: one of moderate height,
well groomed in those days almost to the point of being dapper, very
courteous, bowing low to every student he met, Henry W. Longfellow.
Of him I shall have something to say later on. The other was a man
of unusual stature and stalwart frame, with a face and head of marked
power. His rich brown hair lay in heavy locks; the features were
patrician. He would have been handsome but for an hauteur about the
eyes not quite agreeable. His presence was commanding, not genial. It
was Charles Sumner.

I often encountered the two men in those days, receiving regularly
the poet's sunny recognition and the statesman's rather unsympathetic
stare. Both men were overwhelmingly famous, but, touched
simultaneously by warmth and frost, I, a shy youngster, could keep
my balance in their presence. Sumner in those years was the especial
_bête noire_ of the South and the conservative North, and the
idol of the radicals--at once the most banned and the most blessed
of men. I had, besides, a personal reason for looking upon him with
interest. He was a man with whom my father had once had a sharp
difference, and I wondered, as I watched the stride of the stately
Senator down the street, if he remembered, as my father did, that
difference of twenty-five years before.

My father, in the late twenties a divinity student at Harvard, was a
proctor, living in an entry of Stoughton Hall, for the good order
of which he was expected to care. The only man he ever reported was