twelvemonth, the greater part of which I devoted to accompanying my father on a visit to Cincinnati. And there I became acquainted with Powers, a very few years only my senior, whom I found already the valued friend of my mother and brother. He was at that time--I well remember the look of him--a tall, lanky, but remarkably handsome lad, somewhat awkward in person, but with a calm but at the same time intellectually expressive beauty of feature which marked him as one of Nature's noblemen. His eyes were the most noticeable point about him. They were magnificent--large, clear, well-opened, and expressive of calm thought and the working of the intellect rather than of shrewdness or passion. His manner, I remember, was marked by an exceeding simpleness, and a sort of innocent and dignified straightforwardness which much impressed me. Altogether, my acquaintance with him was a contribution of a new sort to the education of my mind. I had passed eight years in the acquisition of those things which an English "gentleman's education" is supposed to offer. These things (in the year 1829) consisted in a very fair knowledge of Latin and Greek. Unquestionably, the eight years which I had spent in learning those languages had brought with them other advantages and other teachings of an altogether priceless sort. But what they professedly had taught me, what I then considered as the net result of my eight years at school, was a competent knowledge of Latin and Greek, and nothing else. Now, here was a young man of my own age, or little more, about whose idiosyncrasy there was something especially _simpatico_ to me, as the Italians say--who knew nothing whatever of the only things which I knew, but knew a whole world of things of which I was profoundly ignorant. I was (of course) full of prejudices also--ecclesiastical prejudices, class prejudices, political prejudices, caste prejudices--all of which were as unintelligible to my new friend as they would have been to a red Indian. He was singularly free from prejudice of any kind--a sort of original, blank-paper mind, on which nothing had been written save what he had consciously written there himself as the result of his own observations of life. I knew other young Americans, and perceived and could have pointed out characteristics which distinguished them. But Powers was not like them. He seemed to me a sort of Adam, a fresh, new and original _man_, unclassable and unjudgable by any of the formulas or prejudices which served me as means of appreciating men. Despite all this--perhaps because of all this--we soon became great friends. I very shortly discovered that he was wholly and entirely truthful. His "yes" was _yes,_ his "no" was _no_; and not only that, but what is much rarer still, his "five" or "six" was not five and a quarter or six and a half, but _five_ or _six_. I remember in him then what I recognized after many, many years in later