“Mr. Brace was one of the most stimulating and inspired instructors of the Academy. He was widely informed, an enthusiast in botany, mineralogy and the natural sciences generally, besides being well read in English classical literature. The constant conversation which he kept up on these subjects tended more to develop the mind and inspire a love of literature than any mere routine studies. The boys were also incited by his example to set up mineralogical cabinets, and my brother George tramped over the hills in the train of his teacher, with his stone-hammer over his shoulder, for many delightful hours. Many more were spent in recounting to me the stores of wisdom derived from Mr. Brace, who, he told me with pride, corresponded with geologists and botanists in Europe, exchanging specimens with them. “This school is the only one I ever knew which really carried out a thorough course of ancient & modern history. Miss Pierce, with great cleverness had compiled an abridgment of ancient history, from the best sources, in four volumes, for the use of her pupils; after which, Russell’s ‘Modern Europe,’ with Coot’s continuation, and Ramsay’s ‘American Revolution,’ brought us down nearly to our own times. “The interest of those historical recitations with a preceptor so widely informed, and so fascinating in conversation as Mr. Brace, extended farther than the class. Much of the training and inspiration of my early days consisted, not in the things which I was supposed to be studying, but in hearing while seated unnoticed at my desk, the conversation of Mr. Brace with the older classes. “There from hour to hour I listened with eager ears to historical criticisms and discussions, or to recitations in such works as ‘Paley’s Moral Philosophy,’ Blair’s ‘Rhetoric,’ Alison’s ‘On Taste,’ all full of most awakening suggestions. “Mr. Brace exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition. The constant excitement in which he kept the minds of his pupils—the wide and varied regions of thought into which he led them, formed a preparation for teaching composition, the main requisite for which, whatever people may think, is to have something which one feels interested to say. “His manner was to divide his school of about a hundred into divisions of three or four, one of which was to write every week. At the same time, he inspired an ambition by calling every week for volunteers, and there were some who volunteered to write every week. “I remember I could have been but nine years old, and my handwriting hardly formed, when the enthusiasm he inspired led me, greatly to his amusement to volunteer to write every week.