On entering a college out in the midst of that region--the middle of the Mississippi Valley--nearly thirty years ago I was assigned, as my first important task in English, the reading and criticism of one of Parkman's books. I think that "The Oregon Trail" was suggested. I read several volumes, however, but found my interest greatest in "The Pioneers of France in the New World" and "The Jesuits in North America." What I wrote I do not now remember (nor do I wish to refresh my memory), but so persistent was the grip of those graphic relations upon my imagination that years later, when leaving the presidency of that same college, I asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them with fresher copies): the chapel Bible--from which I had been read to by my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to succeeding students--a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"--which my college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through--and a volume of Parkman's on the pioneers of France. So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever speaking in dispassion or without favorable prejudice of them. When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not opened until twenty-five years later--for Parkman lived to return to America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half- Century of Conflict"--it is that parcel which has kept for later generations his remarkable autobiography. While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle. As he himself said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew him best in France. I therefore recall some of the detail of the years preceding those days when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of French archives, who had in his secretive keeping documents most precious to the uses of Parkman.