chapel, one September morning of 1876, on the supremacy of Greek
literature, "urging in conclusion all who would venture upon
Hadley's Grammar as the first thorny stretch toward that celestial
mountain peak, to rise." It is Professor Katharine Lee Bates,
writing in 1892, who gives us the picture: "My next neighbor,
a valorous little mortal, now a member of the Smith faculty, was
the first upon her feet, pulling me after her by a tug at my
sleeve, coupled with a moral tug more efficacious still. Perhaps
a dozen of us freshmen, all told, filed into Professor Horton's
recitation room that morning." And again, "His prompt and vigorous
method of introducing a fresh subject to college notice was the
making it a required study for the senior class of the year.
'79 grappled with biology, '80 had a senior diet of geology and
astronomy." To these young women, as to his juries in earlier
days, he could use words "that burned and cut like the lash of
a scourge," and it is evident that they feared "the somber
lightnings of his eyes."

But he won their affection by his sympathy and humor perhaps,
quite as much as by his personal beauty, and his ideals of
scholarship, and despite his imperious desire to bring their souls
to Christ. They remember lovingly his little jokes. They tell of
how he came into College Hall one evening, and said that a mother
and daughter had just arrived, and he was perplexed to know where
to put them, but he thought they might stay under the staircase
leading up from the center. And students and teachers, puzzled
by this inhospitality but suspecting a joke somewhere, came out
into the center to find the great cast of Niobe and her daughter
under the stairway at the left, where it stayed through all the
years that followed, until College Hall burned down.