IT was, I think, in the winter of 1860, when I was rooming in East College at Williams, that into my introspective life nature flung a sort of cataclysm of health named Sam Armstrong. He came, like other cyclones, from the South Seas, was a Sandwich Islander, son of a missionary. Until Miss Murfree wrote her Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains it would have been impossible to describe Armstrong's immediate personal effect. There was a quality in it that defied the ordinary English vocabulary. To use the eastern Tennessee dialect, which alone could do him justice, he was "plumb survigrous." To begin with, as Mark Twain might express it, he had been fortunate in the selection of his parents. The roots of his nature struck deep into the soil of two strong races. He bore the stamp of both Saxon and Scot. Then, too, he was an islander: his constitution smacked of the seas; there was about him something of the high courage and the jollity of the tar; he carried with him the vitalities of the Like all those South Sea Islanders, he had been brought up to the water; it had imparted to him a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness. It seemed natural for him to strike out in any element. But what impressed one most was his schooling. Not but that it was in unison with the man; it was, in fact, remarkably so; but it was so entirely out of the common, so free-handed and virile. His father had been minister of public instruction at Hawaii. The son had accompanied him on his official tours, and had been let into the business. He could manage a boat in a storm, teach school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a mechanical industry at will, understand natives, sympathize with missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or

ocean.

mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of fun for little children. In short, he was a striking illustration of that Robinson-Crusoelike multiformity of function that grows up perforce under the necessities of a missionary station. New England energy, oceanic breeziness, missionary environment, disclosed themselves in him. Such was Armstrong as he first came into my life, bringing his ozone with him.

Williams College was at that time a remarkable place. Nature seemed to have made preparations for greatness. The mountains compassed it about, forming a giant amphitheatre. The buildings were few and poorly fitted up, the apparatus was meagre, the faculty small in numbers. I doubt, however, if there were many institutions where so much thought-stuff was generated. True, our teachers did not represent metropolitan culture, nor was the mass of knowledge which they communicated prodigious ; they were, however, good drill masters, and, still better for those under their care, they were men of mental and moral muscularity. Two or three were of that highly organized New England type, original in their thought, and impetuous as a Berkshire torrent. It is said that the most important agent in the cultivation of the soil the microbe that sets free the nitrogen. In the process of intellectual cultivation, those men do most who set thought free. Far at the head of all such was President Hopkins. He was a man of undoubted genius, and, happily for his students, that genius had specialized itself on teaching. Furthermore, his genius was fed by a great overshadowing personality. He was a philosopher from sheer love of nature: therefore his philosophy was not of the dryly intellectual kind; it was filled with life, and was deep rooted in the man's heart. He stood

always face to face with nature; he felt her mystery, he caught her spiritual import; his soul was full of wonder and inquiry; he cared more for life than for his theory of it, more for men than for institutions, more for an individual student than for his own success; he first loved, then thought, then taught. His recitation room was more entertaining than a play; the textbook was a starting-point, - — no man could shirk that, – but it was soon left far behind; the method was conversational, Socratic, and spiced with humor. He drew out the thought of each student in turn, and gently compelled each member of the class to wrestle with him; extending the ut most hospitality to his peculiar views, meeting his arguments, with perfect fairness, encouraging him to free his mind and to differ with his teacher, but compelling him at last to face the remorseless logic of his chosen position in a manner sometimes most ludicrous. He was peculiarly gentle, also, toward the weakminded, keeping them on their intellectual legs as long as he could, and letting them down as easily as possible. The whole process was exciting, amusing, and stimulating to the last degree; and when it was over, the student knew that free thought meant the power to think rationally, and that the power to think rationally was not the inalienable endowment of every American citizen. Over and above the dialectic skill and the mental vitality communicated by such a process was a profound impression regarding the truth itself, its reality, its transcendence above all human conceptions of it, and its nutritive value to the human mind. In fact, while Dr. Hopkins taught a most original and valuable philosophy, it was not this which was the aim or principal result of his teaching. It was rather to make his students themselves citizens of that realm of thought, and to enable them to read the book of life at first hand, and particularly to see the commonly misunderstood relationship between the

natural and the spiritual world. The curriculum was organized upon his plan. Without pretending to be so, it really was socialistic in the best sense. The theory was to acquaint the student with man, and thus to put him in working relations with the race to which he belonged.

Armstrong gravitated to Williams College by a social law: it was the resort for missionaries' sons; there was the haystack at which the missionary enterprise was started; it was a kind of sacred soil, a rendezvous for spiritual knight-errants, and Armstrong, though not very spiritual, was a knight-errant to the core. Like other missionaries' sons, he poked fun at natives, and entertained small circles with the ridiculous phases of missionary life; yet he was a kind of missionary in disguise, always ready to go out of his way for the purpose of slyly helping somebody up to a better moral or physical plane. His "plumb survigrousness" gave him an eternal effervescence; in fact, his body was a kind of catapult for his mind; it was forever projecting his mental force in some direction, so that he was continually carrying on intellectual “high jinks," going off into extravaganzas, throwing every subject into a grotesque light: as a result, he was never serious, though always earnest. He took to Williams College as to a natural habitat; he enjoyed the extra molecules of free thought in the atoms of the college atmosphere; he reveled in the class room discussions; he bristled with arguments and swarmed with new ideas; he lifted up his "plumb survigrous" voice and made intellectual pandemonium at the dinner table.

He was a trifle above middle height, broad-shouldered, with large, well-poised head, forehead high and wide, deep-set flashing eyes, a long mane of light brown hair, his face very brown and sailor-like. He bore his head high, and carried about an air of insolent good health. unconventional in his notions, Shake

He was

spearean in sympathy, wished to see all sides of life, yet he never formed affiliations with the bad side. If he touched pitch, he got rid of it as soon as he could; pleasantly if possible, but at all events decidedly. He had a robust habit of will, and laid hold always of the best in his environment.

Intellectually he was a leader. Spiritually he was religious; that is, he had a profound faith in God, and a deep reverence for his father's life and work, as appears in his Reminiscences, a delightful little book, full of the rarest humor and tenderness. Yet everybody felt he was under tremendous terrestrial headway. Sometimes he seemed to have little respect for the spiritual: he shocked people by his levity; he was irreverent in speech. But there was about him at all times a profound reverence of spirit for God, manhood, womanhood, and all sacred realities. Indeed, with him reverence and religion alike were matters not of form, but of an inward principle whose application he had not yet mastered. Other men were original in thought; he was original in character; but above all there was an immediacy of nature. His greatest tendency seemed to be to go ahead; he has, in fact, often reminded me of Harry Wadsworth, the hero of E. E. Hale's Ten Times One Are Ten. He was the most strenuous man I ever saw. Naturally he was a problem to us, what would he come to? Dr. Arnold said of himself, "Aut Cæsar, aut nullus." Armstrong said of himself, "Missionary or pirate.”

He joined us in the junior year. With the senior year began the war. Its tumultuous scenes penetrated by report into our cloisters. Armstrong was more patriotic than many native-born Americans; he had a stronger intellectual estimate of our country's worth. As soon as he graduated he helped form a regi

little to turn him into a veritable Mars. but he did not at once "drink delight of battle with his peers." Instead of that, he ate salt pork, and slept in the mud in a little hole in Virginia; thence came letters in which Hotspur, Artemus Ward, and the Hebrew prophets seem strangely commingled. Armstrong was uncomfortable, plainly. He writes: “I am on pins. I am tired of this puttering round in Virginia mud. Why live I here? Here's to the heathen; rather, here's to the nigger. I wish there were fewer girls, no devil, and a sweet valley like Typee for every mortal. The great conflagration cannot be averted much longer. The cry of the poor is so piteous, of the good so imploring and just, and of the persecuted and enslaved so terrible that it seems as if the fullness of time were accomplished already, and that a devouring fire was needed to quench the wrong and restore the right. I hope that until the slave, and every slave, can call himself his own, and his wife and children his own, the sword will not cease from among us; and I care not how many the evils that attend it, it will all be just. The above will do. I feel better."

Nonsense was Armstrong's relief from hard work and strong feeling; it was the escape valve of his brains. He soon had a happier time; there was plenty of fighting even for him. At Gettysburg he distinguished himself for bravery. His own account of it was that, knowing a moving target was the hardest to hit, he tore up and down the lines like a madman, shouting to his men to come on, which seemed to onlookers the height of gallantry, but was to him the height of prudence. Before long he accepted the command of a colored regiment. Here he first learned the sterling qualities of that race, noting particularly how it was capable of being lifted above the fear of death. A friend who went to see him in camp near Petersburg found the regiment safely quartered in a ra

vine, while the colonel's tent was pitched on a little elevated plateau, across which the enemy's cannon shot were continually ricochetting, after a manner which, according to the narrator's account, "turned his liver to water." He remonstrated with Armstrong on living in a place where, day and night, he was liable to be disemboweled; but he replied that the morale of the colored troops required it, and that they would do anything for a man who showed himself superior to fear. At the close of the war, he had, without assistance, risen to the rank of brevet brigadier general, but he had not attained to his best manhood. Militarism was not his field; he was essentially constructive; he was not made to smash things, but to build them.

Thrown in with General Howard, he was led by the influence of that philanthropist to take charge of the Freedmen's Bureau at Hampton, Virginia. Some ten thousand black refugees were there huddled together, mostly in wretched. hovels, on confiscated land. The United States government issued them rations, the American Missionary Association sent them missionaries. Their condition was incoherent and miserable.

Armstrong was always "helping lame dogs over stiles." He gathered about him a staff composed of broken-down classmates and war comrades, I was one of the lot. I was ill on my bed one day, when the door was flung open, and in came Armstrong, his head up in the air, his military cap on one side, and flourishing a rattan cane in his hand. Four other young fellows were following him, and all were roaring out at the top of their lungs, "Hinky, dinky, darby, ram! hinky, dinky, da!”

Yet that roistering militarism was mere blowing off of steam; underneath it there lay the germ of a profoundly great and sympathetic manhood. The destructives mature young, smashers of armies, creeds, and the like. But Armstrong did not belong to that class; his

powers were of the highest order, his development had just begun. There were no holes in his mind; everything good he had kept. In the mud, by the camp fire, the great ideas of the class room had recurred to him. Amid the wild scenes of the war, he had been putting together the elemental principles of human life; he had studied human nature profoundly, and had critically sifted a wide range of facts. He was not emotional nor sentimental; was inclined to take a ludicrous view of the "darky," as he called him; was not unconscious of the fact that he had made a brilliant record. Glory tasted good in his mouth; furthermore, he was offered a brilliant position in the business world. But he had carried away, like others of us, from Dr. Hopkins's class room a touchstone by which to test glory and all other things, and deep within him there was a principle of which he had never let go, but which was ever coming more and more to the front. What it was appears between the lines in his Reminiscences. As one reads the description of his boyhood's home in Honolulu, taking in as it does both the noble and the droll side of mission life; as one sees how he dwells on the sacrifices of his father and mother, one thing becomes clear, the standpoint of his life. He never ceased to look at things from the doorway of that missionary home. Fundamental in him, inmost treasure of his heart, was that principle of sacrifice and service for the race, for any and every kind of man, because he was a man, and because Christ had died for him, putting on him a divine valuation; and along with this principle there was at his heart's core the germ of that kind of faith that obtains promises and stops the mouths of lions.

At this very time, writing to his old college chum, he says: "Well, chum, I'm rolling over lots of wild schemes in my head, and one of these days I'll strike out. I want you along. But mind,