“Somehow, something Brooks said that afternoon stirred me up all over again and set me to thinking. Mather and I didn’t say anything as we came out, but I knew he too was thinking. “We started off on a walk, and after a while, as we tramped along down past old John Harvard’s statue and on past the gymnasium, he threw back his head and, clapping me on the shoulder, burst out, ‘I say, old fellow, that man is a brick!’ “We turned down Craigie Street and sauntered on. Presently John Fiske turned the corner and nodded in a jolly way over his glasses at us. ‘Did you know, Conro,’ asked Mather, after we had passed out of hearing, ‘that Fiske could read fifteen languages, and knew no end of history and everything else, and had made his mark, before he was as old as we are by some years?’ “I didn’t know it, but I hadn’t time to say so before I looked up and saw just in front of us the gray beard and brown eyes of the man whom I, for one, think to be the greatest poet America has ever had. “I had just got hold of Lowell last winter. Those lines of his which Miss Brewster quoted to us had set me to looking him up, and I was amazed to see how little I had known of his power. “Well, whether it was Miss Brewster, or Phillips Brooks, or these men, the two best writers of English on the continent, and the thought of what they had made their lives mean in the world of ideas, I don’t know, but suddenly it all came over me, the thought of earnest lives that stood for something, and my own confounded folly, and I broke out for the first time: ‘I say, Mather, if a fellow has been a deuced fool for the first twenty-two years of his life, what is he likely to be at the end of the next twenty-two?’ “Mather evidently didn’t think that was a question which required an answer, and we tramped along together in silence for a while longer. Then he began, ‘Conro, didn’t what Brooks said to-day make you think of that night last winter when that black-eyed girl over there at Louisburg Square just laid us fellows out? “‘Gracious! how she did seem to take it all to heart, as if we had committed the unpardonable sin, as Gordon said. Whew!—didn’t it make him mad, though?—but—well—somehow I don’t know but she was more than half right after all. “‘Some things she said have been running through my head lately: “Never a time or place where heart and brains and hands could find such work to do and reap such far-reaching results.... Everything has been done for us, to be sure, but we can’t be expected to go out of our way to see that it is passed along.”’