But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country, and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence. XXIII OLD NEWPORT DAYS OLD NEWPORT DAYS It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame, in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward Waring.