love, Lincoln used to say, was the most precious
thing that had ever come his way. I know a man who loves his
mother-in-law, because she pitied him. Our Oneida friends had
"Community Mothers," who took care of everybody's babies, just as if
they were their own, and with marked success, for the genus hoodlum
never evolved at Oneida. Grandmother-love served all purposes for little
Isaac Newton, just as it did for John Fiske.

John Fiske's grandmother was his first teacher, and she started out with
the assumption that genius always skips one generation. She believed
that she was dealing with a record-breaker, and she was. What she did
not know about the classics was known by others whom she delegated to
teach her grandchild.

When her baby genius was just out of linsey-woolsey dresses and wore
trousers buttoned to a calico waist, she began preparing him for
college. The old lady had loved a college man in her youth, and she
judged Harvard by the Harvard man she knew best. And the Harvard man she
saw in her waking dreams, she created in her own image. Harvard requires
perspective, and viewed over the years through a mist of melancholy it
is very beautiful. At close range we often get a Jarrett Bumball flavor
of cigarettes and a sight of the foam that made Milwaukee famous. To a
great degree, Gran'ma Fiske created her Harvard out of the stuff that
dreams are made of. When her little charge was six years old, she began
preparing him for Harvard by teaching him to say, "amo, amas, amat."

At seven years of age he was reading Caesar's "Commentaries" and making
wise comments over his bowl of bread-and-milk about the Tenth Legion;
and he also had his opinions concerning the relationship of Caesar with
Cleopatra. At this time he read Josephus for rest, and discovered for
himself that the famous passage about Jesus of Nazareth was an
interpolation.

When he was eight, he was familiar with Plato, had read all of
Shakespeare's plays, and propounded a few hypotheses concerning the
authorship of the "Sonnets."

At nine he spoke Greek with an Attic accent. When ten he had read
Prescott, Gibbon and Macaulay; and about this time, as a memory test he
wrote a history of the world from the time of Moses down to the date of
his own birth, giving a list of the greatest men who had ever lived,
with a brief mention of what they had done, with the date of their birth
and death.

This book is still in existence and so far as I know has neve