It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever passed between us. I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner were simple, as of old. He was entitled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners. It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.