serious books. It was difficult to name any
noteworthy work of history or biography or any popular book on natural
science with which he was not acquainted.

As I saw him two years ago, when he was seventy years old, he was in the
best of health and vigor, which seemed to promise many years of life. He
was tall, erect, with a frame denoting great physical strength, and he
had distinctively a military bearing. He was an agreeable companion, an
excellent talker, a scrupulously honest and truthful man, and a
gentleman.

EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE

A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March
meeting of 1908.

EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE

When an associate dies who was not yet forty-eight years old, whom most
of us knew as a strong enduring man, who was capable of an immense
amount of intellectual work, it is a real calamity,--a calamity which in
this case History mourns, as Edward Gaylord Bourne was an excellent
teacher and a thorough historical scholar. The physical details of any
illness are apt to be repulsive, but the malady in Bourne's case was
somehow so bound up in his life that an inquiry into it comes from no
morbid curiosity. When ten years old he was attacked with tubercular
disease of the hip, and for some weeks his life was despaired of; but he
was saved by the loving care of his parents, receiving particular
devotion from his father, who was a Congregational minister in charge of
a parish in Connecticut. As the left leg had out-grown the other, Bourne
was obliged to use crutches for three years, when his father took him to
a specialist in Boston, and the result was that he was able to abandon
crutches and in the end to get about by an appliance to adjust the
lengths of the different legs, such as his friends were familiar with.
Despite this disability he developed great physical strength, especially
in the chest and arms, but his lameness prevented his accompanying his
college companions on long tramps, so that the bicycle was for him a
most welcome invention. He became expert in the use of it, riding on it
down Pike's Peak at the time of his visit to Colorado; and he performed
a similar feat of endurance on another occasion when stopping with me at
Jefferson in the White Mountains. Starting early in the morning, he
traveled by rail to the terminus of the mountain railroad, went up Mount
Washington on the railroad, and rode down the carriage road on his wheel
to the Glen Hous