My Memories of Eighty Years | Page 5

an occasion memorable in their experience.
John Mason Brown, of Kentucky, became afterwards the leader of the
bar in his State, and was about to receive from President Harrison an
appointment as justice of the Supreme Court when he died suddenly. If
he had been appointed it would have been a remarkable circumstance

that three out of nine judges of the greatest of courts, an honor which is
sought by every one of the hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the
United States, should have been from the same college and the same
class.
The faculty lingers in my memory, and I have the same reverence and
affection for its members, though sixty-five years out of college, that I
had the day I graduated. Our president, Theodore D. Woolsey, was a
wonderful scholar and a most inspiring teacher. Yale has always been
fortunate in her presidents, and peculiarly so in Professor Woolsey. He
had personal distinction, and there was about him an air of authority
and reserved power which awed the most radical and rebellious student,
and at the same time he had the respect and affection of all. In his
historical lectures he had a standard joke on the Chinese, the narration
of which amused him the more with each repetition. It was that when a
Chinese army was beleaguered and besieged in a fortress their
provisions gave out and they decided to escape. They selected a very
dark night, threw open the gates, and as they marched out each soldier
carried a lighted lantern.
In the faculty were several professors of remarkable force and
originality. The professor of Greek, Mr. Hadley, father of the
distinguished ex-president of Yale, was more than his colleagues in the
thought and talk of the undergraduates. His learning and pre-eminence
in his department were universally admitted. He had a caustic wit and
his sayings were the current talk of the campus. He maintained
discipline, which was quite lax in those days, by the exercise of this
ability. Some of the boys once drove a calf into the recitation-room.
Professor Hadley quietly remarked: "You will take out that animal. We
will get along to-day with our usual number." It is needless to say that
no such experiment was ever repeated.
At one time there was brought up in the faculty meeting a report that
one of the secret societies was about to bore an artesian well in the
cellar of their club house. It was suggested that such an extraordinary
expense should be prohibited. Professor Hadley closed the discussion
and laughed out the subject by saying from what he knew of the society,
if it would hold a few sessions over the place where the artesian well
was projected, the boring would be accomplished without cost. The
professor was a sympathetic and very wise adviser to the students. If

any one was in trouble he would always go to him and give most
helpful relief.
Professor Larned inspired among the students a discriminating taste for
the best English literature and an ardent love for its classics. Professor
Thacher was one of the most robust and vigorous thinkers and teachers
of his period. He was a born leader of men, and generation after
generation of students who graduated carried into after-life the effects
of his teaching and personality. We all loved Professor Olmstead,
though we were not vitally interested in his department of physics and
biology. He was a purist in his department, and so confident of his
principles that he thought it unnecessary to submit them to practical
tests. One of the students, whose room was immediately over that of
the professor, took up a plank from the flooring, and by boring a very
small hole in the ceiling found that he could read the examination
papers on the professor's desk. The information of this reaching the
faculty, the professor was asked if he had examined the ceiling. He said
that was unnecessary, because he had measured the distance between
the ceiling and the surface of his desk and found that the line of vision
connected so far above that nothing could be read on the desk.
Timothy Dwight, afterwards president, was then a tutor. Learning,
common sense, magnetism, and all-around good-fellowship were
wonderfully united in President Dwight. He was the most popular
instructor and best loved by the boys. He had a remarkable talent for
organization, which made him an ideal president. He possessed the rare
faculty of commanding and convincing not only the students but his
associates in the faculty and the members of the corporation when
discussing and deciding upon business propositions and questions of
policy.
The final examinations over, commencement day arrived. The literary
exercises and the conferring of degrees took place in the old Center
Church. I was one of the