Two years ago the 9th day of September, when the doctor was visiting in Sauquoit, he called here and remarked, in his smiling way, “that he had got all over feeling badly about _that_.” I said, “And well you may when you have received so many honors since then.” Your loving friend, HARRIET ROGERS. A neighbor who survived to a great age also told a story of Dr. Gray’s boyhood, which he said he had from Dr. Gray’s father:-- One day he had been set to hoe a certain amount of corn, and his father found him reading instead of at his work. He gave him his choice, to finish his task and then read comfortably, or to sit there in the field all day in the hot sun, which one knows is no pleasant thing in August, and read. He chose the reading, and his father said then, “I made up my mind he might make something of a scholar, but he would never make a farmer!” And so his farther education was decided. [11] Asa Gray was the eldest of eight children, three sisters and four brothers, of whom there survive two sisters and two brothers. [12] Dr. Gray visited Fairfield again in the summer of 1860 or 1861. He pointed out his old room, and told about some of the pranks he and his room-mate Eli Avery had played there as boys, especially once when they barred their room, escaped through the window by clambering down a rope, and then enjoyed the efforts of the master to break the door down. Oddly enough there was then a fresh panel in the door, as if a later generation had tried the same trick. There were a great many stories told of his exploits as a boy. But he said everything had been fathered upon him, and that few were really true. He was no doubt restless and active, and learning quickly and easily would have leisure for some mischief, but he said, “I always learned my lessons.” He loved to recall the long rambles through the woods on Saturday holidays, and how in early spring he and his companions would climb to a lookout and see where columns of smoke could be seen above the trees, and so aim for the spot where they were making maple sugar. There they would beg a little syrup, and, boiling it down over their own fire and cooling it on snow, make a candy more delicious than any confectionery of after life. He remembered how he trained himself to know the trees by their bark as he ran through the woods, without looking up at the leaves, having then the keen power of observation though no especial interest in botany. For, as he always said, his first fancy was for mineralogy rather than for botany. And he told how when he was a medical student, as so many about him were smoking, he tried it too; it made him very sick at first, and took him some time to get accustomed to it. At last, as he sat one evening before the fire and smoked, he said to himself, “Really, I am beginning to like it. It will become a habit; I shall be dependent upon it.” And so he threw his cigar into the fire and gave up smoking entirely.