lady who so unconsciously had put him in this foolish position, and rowed defiantly back to Oyster Bay without paying the proposed visit! During that summer my father, who always gave his children such delightful surprises, drilled us himself in a little play called “To Oblige Benson,” in which Theodore took the part of an irascible and absent-minded farmer, and our beloved cousin John Elliott the part of an impassioned lover, while my friend Fannie Smith and I were the heroines of the adventures. My father’s efforts to make Theodore into a farmer and John into a lover were commendable though not eminently successful, but all that he did for us in those ways gave to his children a certain ease in writing and speaking which were to be of great value in later years. Fannie Smith, to show how Theodore still dominated the little circle from the standpoint of intellect, writes that same July: “I have no power to write sensibly today. If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’” In his early college days, however, he seems temporarily to put the “philosophy of Diogenes” aside, and to become a very normal, simple, pleasure-loving youth, who, however, always retained his earnest moral purpose and his realization that education was a tool for future experience, and, therefore, not to be neglected. He writes on November 26, 1876: “I now belong to another whist club, composed of Harry Minot, Dick Saltonstall and a few others. They are very quiet fellows but also very pleasant. Harry Minot was speaking to me the other day about our making a collecting trip in the White Mountains together next summer. I think it would be good fun.” The result of that collecting trip will be shown a little later in this chapter. On December 14 he writes again: “Darling Pussie [his pet name for me]: I ought to have written you long ago but I am now having examinations all the time, and am so occupied in studying for them that I have very little time for myself, and you know how long it takes me to write a letter. My only excitement lately has been the dancing class which is very pleasant. I may as well describe a few of my chief friends.” He then gives an account of his specially intimate companions, and speaks as follows of one whose name has become prominent in the annals of his country’s history as able financier, secretary of state, and colonel in the American Expeditionary Force--Robert Bacon: “Bob Bacon is the handsomest man in the class and is as pleasant as he is handsome. He is only sixteen, but is very large.” He continues to say that he would love to bring home a few of his friends at Christmas time, and concludes: “I should like a party very much if it is _perfectly_ convenient.” The party proved a delightful Christmas experience, and the New York girls and Boston boys fraternized to their hearts’ content. On his return to Cambridge after