judges of the Supreme Court
of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
asked, "Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?"--11 boys
whose tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was
like the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty
waves upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city
of Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of
the Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, "My Country,
't is of thee," is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them,
than all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our
six were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed
the list. Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs?
No,--we remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we
had lost in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could
we forget James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous
action, who pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt
through all its channels as are the light and the strength that radiate
through the wires which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness
to have such classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping,
complaining graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had
been favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well
into its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful
and life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished
to do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
"the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life. She comm