Girls who had brothers sometimes attended the monthly Public Saturday at the old Latin School on Bedford Street. At the end of the hall stood an allegorical figure by my friend, the sculptor, Mr. Richard Greenough, commemorating the graduates who fell in the Civil War. The speaker’s platform was just in front of this memorial. Parents, friends, and girls occupied the benches, facing the rostrum. I remember one of the Saturday mornings, when Lester Clark recited Mrs. Norton’s “Bingen on the Rhine” and Frank Dumaresq gave, with great effect, the Tower Scene from “King John.” A program of the Prize Declamation of May 27th, 1871, has been preserved. The opening number was “Harold the Dauntless”, given in great style by “Carty” Fenno. My kinsman, Morton Prince, recited William Everett’s “Themistocles.” The “Daughter of Herodias” was sympathetically interpreted by Dumaresq; and the “Burial of Dundee” by Colonel Lester Clark. After the award of prizes, Gilmore’s Band played “Fair Harvard.” We sometimes condescended to attend the Chauncy Hall School’s “Declamations”, to hear George Riddle’s fine recitations. Riddle was a beautiful boy, with a poetic face and fiery brown eyes. I was present when he won his first prize by his recitation of the Dagger Scene from “Macbeth.” Riddle became a professional reader later on, and I never missed an occasion to hear him recite. As an actor he had no success, with one great exception: his acting in “Oedipus Tyrannus”, at Harvard, was a notable dramatic achievement. The chief figure at all public functions of Latin School was the head master, Francis Gardner, tall, thin, spectacled, with eyes that looked a boy through and through and an uncanny flair for mischief. It was said that he ruled “with a rod of iron and a cotton umbrella.” Though the boys feared, hated, and talked flippantly of him as “Old Gardner”, after they left school they were apt to confess to a sneaking fondness for their old master. When they had sons of their own, they have been known to declare that they loved and honored him. William Hunt’s portrait shows the man exactly as I remember him,--tall, gaunt, severe, lovable too, and at the first glance recognizable as a splendid specimen of the schoolmaster of fifty years ago. The modern educators, I know, have many qualities that he lacked; but they have lost something that Mr. Gardner possessed. They rule with the olive branch, where he ruled with the birch rod. Boston Latin School, under Francis Gardner, was a very different place from the Happy Valley of Rasselas schools, where to-day most of my young friends receive their education. These schools are delightful places for parents and aunts to visit; but are they not a trifle “soft” to fit a youth for the rough and tumble of the great world? CHAPTER IV SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS