I shall not linger over the burly and severe but sound pedagogue who taught us history and physics nor over the graceful youth--still young and vivid in his middle age--who taught French and German with a stringent accuracy and sternness that added virility to his Greek profile and his curving locks. It is on our teacher of Latin that I must dwell. I cannot estimate his influence over me. To this day I find myself using locutions and mannerisms that are ultimately traceable to him. He was--I beg his pardon for writing of him as in the past, but to me he lives only in the past, though admirably and fruitfully to others in the present--he was the son of an Italian gentleman, obviously of gentle lineage and exquisite breeding. His face and head and hands and form had in them something indescribably Roman. Roman of the empire. But for his severer modern morals he might have been a friend of Petronius and, like him, an _arbiter elegantiarum_. Or, from another point of view, a gentleman of the age of Queen Anne--a friend of Addison. Of course this does not render the whole man. But he was singularly free from all the modern maladies of the soul--a devout Catholic with a frugal and pagan delight in the good things of the world, a lover of the arts without morbid intensity or perverting ambitions, a believer in that golden mean which he interpreted so well. I need hardly say that the particular objects of his tireless and exquisite zeal were Vergil and Horace and, among English writers, Milton and Tennyson and Thackeray. As a teacher he was strict, though always with a light touch--stinging the lazy and loutish by some ironic turn of speech. He taught us to appreciate a fine and mellow Latinity as well as the human warmth and living power of the literature we read. But he was tireless, too, in the humbler portions of his task. I find I know my Latin accidence and syntax better to-day than graduate students who “major” in Latin at our universities. And I can still hear his voice as, repeating some line of Vergil, he first awakened me to the magic of a great and perfect style: “... et jam nox umida coelo praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.” It was in the third year of High School. He was teaching us to scan Vergil. We were repeating a passage in unison. Suddenly he swung on his heels and pointed his finger straight at me: “That is the only boy who has a natural ear for verse!” he cried. A keen, strange quiver went through me. I realized the meaning suddenly of that constant scribbling which I had been impelled to during the preceding months. I had a gift for literature! I knew it now; I never doubted it again. My fate had found me. Ludwig Lewisohn. _Upstream._ By permission of Boni and Liveright, Publishers. THE PHOTOGRAPH LAURA SPENCER PORTOR