nominated and elected.

Emerson once delivered a lecture in Boston on university life in which he
made the rather bold statement that "in the course of twenty years the
rank-list is likely to become inverted." One of Professor Child's class
paraphrased this lecture for a theme, and against the sentence above
quoted the Professor wrote: "A statement frequently made, but what is the
fact?" I do not think he liked Emerson quite so well after this, and he
can hardly be blamed for feeling so. It was not only a disparagement of
good scholarship but like a personal slight upon himself. That Emerson
graduated near the foot of his class ought not to prove that an idle
college life is a sign of genius.

Professor Child talked freely in regard to the meetings of the college
faculty, for he believed that graduates had a right to know about them.
He quoted some amusing anecdotes of a certain professor who led the
opposition against President Eliot and praised the dignified manner with
which Eliot regarded him. In 1879 he said one day:

"We are in the half-way stage between a college and a university, and
there is consequently great confusion. If we once became a university,
pure and simple, all that would be over; but the difficulty is that the
material which comes to us is so poor. I do not mean that the young men
are lacking in intelligence, but the great majority of them do not brace
themselves to the work. As Doctor Hedge says, the heart of the college is
in the boating and ball-playing and not in its studies."

His third occupation and chief recreation was his rose-garden. The whole
space between his front piazza and Kirkland Street was filled with rose-
bushes which he tended himself, from the first loosening of the earth in