Among the things that his biographer left out was that old black meerschaum pipe of the late sixties and early seventies. It was an equilateral triangle about two and a half inches on edge, cut from a slab of meerschaum a little over an inch thick. It had a cherry stem about a foot long. When Fiske got settled down, he would slowly pull the bowl and the stem and the tobacco separately from some of the infinite recesses of his person, and get them together and in operation, and then heave one of his immense sighs of contentment, and be ready for conversation. Yet there's a paradox in my recollections of this pipe. I'm sure all those I have stated are correct, and yet at that time "the recesses of his person" had hardly begun to approximate infinity, as they afterwards did: amid all the impressions is one that he was rather slight, but that must have had something to do with the thinnish beard of the portrait before me as I write, which it is a pity was not put into the biography. He was the "broadest-minded" man I ever knew--most alive to the good points of things he did not endorse. During his whole life his attitude toward the religion which had persecuted him, was one of reverent but discriminating affection. * * * * * Yet it is hardly fair to discourage readers, as it must be admitted Fiske's biographer does, by leaving the implication that this extraordinary creature was superhuman. With all his colossal powers, he was not, perhaps fortunately for us, what is usually called a genius: his conclusions were reasoned and consistent, and his likes and dislikes reliable. But he had not that intuitive power which leads a man like a bee in a quick straight line to the essential thing, or to put vast accumulations of truth into epigrams. He was enormously instructive and always entertaining, but he was seldom suggestive. He dealt in food, rather than in condiments. He had to plod to his conclusions in his irresistible elephantine way. To get rid of Christian dogmatism, when the first page of the Westminster Catechism is enough for some men, he had to read a library; and when he was twenty-two, he wrote Spencer that he had "successively adopted and rejected the system of almost every philosopher from Descartes to Professor Ferrier."