Runner of the Mountain Tops: The Life of Louis Agassiz
by Mabel Louise Robinson (1874-1962)
New York, Random House, 1939. Copyright not renewed.
With decorations by Lynd Ward (1905-1985)



A Newbery Honor Book, 1940.

RUNNER OF THE MOUNTAIN TOPS

Other Books by Mabel L. Robinson

BRIGHT ISLAND

JUVENILE STORY WRITING

CREATIVE WRITING

THE ART OF WRITING PROSE

THE CURRICULUM OF THE WOMAN'S COLLEGE

Runner of the Mountain Tops

THE LIFE OF LOUIS AGASSIZ

BY MABEL L. ROBINSON

With decorations by Lynd Ward

RANDOM HOUSE   ^.   NEW YORK

FIRST PRINTING

COPYRIGHT, 1939, BY MABEL L. ROBINSON
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author makes grateful acknowledgment

To The Macmillan Company, New York, for permission to quote from Life, Letters, and Work of Louis Agassiz, by Jules Marcou. 1896.

To Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, for permission to quote from Louis Agassiz. His Life and Correspondence, by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. 1886.

To Thomas Barbour, Director, and to William Edward Schevill, Librarian, of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, for their kindness in making available a selection of illustrations from the original plates.

To Frederick P. Keppel for his help in procuring the plates.

To Elizabeth J. Worcester for her generous sharing of her memories of Louis Agassiz.

To George R. Agassiz for his book and his cordial cooperation.

To the staff of Random House for their unstinted effort to supply this book with every advantage which an author could desire.

FOREWORD

FOR long I have been waiting for a biography of Louis Agassiz, one which would re-create this man of genius and his headlong splendid race through life. Except for a few old biographies now out of print, and occasional references to his gifts and charm in literary criticisms, his part in the growing-up of our country seemed slipping out of the consciousness of the young people of today. Yet because Louis Agassiz was wise enough and reckless enough with youth to discard dull bookish learning for original observation, he gave even the youngest learner a chance to share the high excitement and triumph of firsthand discovery which men of science had always kept for their own prerogative. "Come with me," he said. "I will show you how to find things out for yourself." And like an immortal Pied Piper, youth has followed him ever since. Little he would care because now and then they lost sight of him so long as they followed the trail. But Louis Agassiz was a man to remember.

A man to remember because genius is rare and we need to know the expression of it to respect its presence and to give it priority; its contradictions to have patience with it; its ruthlessness to step aside for it; its contributions to place at the service of new-found genius. Louis Agassiz had a magnetic quality which gave him an effortless priority, but he was ruthless enough to destroy obstacles when they appeared. He was full of contradictions; a born leader without judgment to lead; a vitality which constantly urged new projects, and a pattern of diffuseness which left them unfinished; a man who loved laughter, and praise, and new people and places and projects, who could shut himself into a sealed hermitage of work and emerge to charm every variety of human being with his magic; a man whose contributions have given us more plentiful living.

Other men to whom these qualities might apply would, perhaps, make a biographer, who faces all the great men of the ages, hesitate where to choose. There was no choice in my case. Louis Agassiz was the only person whose biography I ever intended to write.

I seem always to have known him. The house in Waltham which became my home was his whenever he would come out there to visit its original owner, Dr. Thomas Hill, who as president of Harvard knew Agassiz well. I have heard tales about him until I could see him here and there about the place, collecting specimens, telling stories to the Hill children, diving into the closet of my room at his wife's scream that a snake was in her shoe, and his disappointed cry, "What only one, my dear!" Or the dinner where he interrupted his story of a capture to say thoughtfully, "I believe I must have sat on him," and drew a limp little snake from his pocket while a Hill child, who feared snakes greatly, watched with a horror she never forgot.

I heard about him at Radcliffe where he and his wife, Elizabeth, and his son, and his grandsons, poured the riches of their wealth, and much more important, of their hearts and minds. I climbed the stairs of Agassiz Museum to the small laboratories reserved for girls, and found there as wide horizons as any museum could offer. I used the specimens which he had housed there, and grew strong and happy under the kind of teaching which was as much a part of his bequest as the museum. Louis Agassiz, himself, could not have done a deed more characteristic of his methods with a struggling student than the one which Dr. Parker did for me and probably forgot the next day.

With a college program filled to capacity, I had agreed to assist in a zoology course at Wellesley. Demonstrate, said the head of the department for my first assignment, the hyoid bone and its anterior something or other to the class. Here is your frog. Dissect it and come back at nine tomorrow. I had no idea what a hyoid bone was, I could not get back to Cambridge that night, and I spent frenzied hours with a pair of scissors in the bathroom trying to locate the bone. With the frog pretty badly hacked up, I took an early train to Cambridge and raced over to the Agassiz Museum. I was poring over a manual with the frog in my hand when Dr. Parker strolled into the laboratory and took in the situation instantly. In a few minutes he had found me a fresh frog, given me brief directions, watched me dissect the hyoid successfully, and sent me flying for a train which would reach Wellesley at nine. The head of the department there sharply observed my demonstration to the first group of students, and then left me with the class. But what, I have often thought, would have happened to my career if a wise and kind professor had not given it a hand! Agassiz would have approved of the men who followed him.

Later when my students got into the doldrums over circulatory systems and what-not, a lecture about Agassiz always set them up. Even out in Constantinople College where nobody had ever heard of him, the magic of the man got instant response. Here was a man whose interests were as wide as the world which returned his interest. Here he was, more ours in his choice of America than if he had been born here, our distinguished foreign citizen, a man whose gifts were so generous and whose charm so engaging that even the story of them won response, a man whom we have no right to forget. He had lived so long for me that I always wanted to make him alive for a generation which thrives on his efforts without knowing it.

If I had been able to analyze the equipment which a biographer has to bring to his task, I should probably never have had the presumption to undertake the work. Now through writing a biography, I have learned humbly some of the essential requirements for it.

I now know that a biography requires the infinite patience of the research student with his skill at organization of facts but with no such simple expedient of recording them in an orderly way for a doctor's degree. The work for a doctor's degree would be only the beginning of a biography! For the ramifications connected with digging out a life and presenting it as a complete whole are endless. The biographer could go on reading forever about the periods and countries which gave a man existence.

For a biographer must know not only his subject from birth to death, but the background of ancestry which produced him and delivered him over to the world the person that he is. He must know the people and the social conditions of the countries where the man lived and worked, and how they affected his life and achievements. For no man lives alone! Louis Agassiz came out of Switzerland, chose Germany for study, France and England for stimulus to his progress, and America for work and for living, thus making a good deal of trouble for his biographers, one of whom feels that she was never really educated before.

The biographer needs also to see his material with the selective eye of a fiction writer. He must be able to dramatize the problems and high points of a man's career until they become as real to the reader as his own. He must know how to discard insignificant items, a process with which the research student is usually unacquainted. He must supply the concrete details which no man can remember from the past by identifying himself so closely with the character that he sees and feels and hears with him. Without this re-creation his biography can have none of the reality which a reader needs to share an experience and realize its truth.

Finally the biographer must have the interpretive power of a wise and understanding critic. He must see his man as an individual, and as a member of the society wherein he moves. He must realize his faults and his weaknesses as well as the glory which has made him what he is. He must keep a wise balance of praise and blame. No man has lived whose life would not reveal some grounds for negative criticism, but if there is nothing more to say about a person, much better make another choice of character.

Then, since a man does not become quickened into life through the dates of his existence, the biographer learns to use dates as keys to unlock the rooms where the man has lived with his contemporaries. If the reader can have an intimate sense of Louis Agassiz's loss when Cuvier died and left him alone in Paris, of his dependence upon Humboldt's advice, whether he took it or not, of his Saturday night walk back to Cambridge with Lowell, he may realize the man more accurately than through a list of precise dates.

I therefore salute all biographers with the realization that only a complete lifetime is sufficient preparation to join their high calling. I have tried here simply to capture some of the essence of the man who, boy to man, never ceased to be a Runner of the Mountain Tops.

MABEL L. ROBINSON

CONTENTS

PART I.	SHELTERED VALLEYS
1.	A Boy's Day	3
2.	Out of the Mountains	13
3.	Harvest; and Seed-Time	24
4.	Growing Up	36
5.	College and a Girl	45
6.	Boyhood Takes Its Degree	62
PART II.	STEEP SLOPES
7.	The Scholars' Road to Paris	83
8.	Time to Settle Down	99
9.	No Man Is Free from Another	111
10.	A Laboratory-Home	120
11.	The Jubilant Mountains	138
12.	A Man Needs Room to Grow	148
PART III.	THE HEIGHTS
13.	Our Distinguished Immigrant	159
14.	New Peaks to Scale	171
15.	A Home Out of Chaos	184
16.	His Golden Anniversary	196
17.	For No Man Stands Alone	211
18.	Salvage of Time	223
19.	Nothing Left Undone	236
20.	Small Island of Life	252
APPENDIX
	Illustrations	267
	Bibliography	285
	Chronology of Life of Louis Agassiz	287

PART I

SHELTERED VALLEYS

THE sky paled as morning came over the mountains. The velvet dark peaks stretched themselves into the lake until water and earth were one. Their still shadows on the water no longer held stars. Slowly the lake brightened into blue, and when the wind poured down the mountain side and broke it into shining fragments, day had come.

The wind carried the fragrance of deep woods and high sweet pastures into a room where a child slept. He stirred as if called. In his sleep he heard the cowbells, clear, irregular, as the cows moved knee-deep at grazing. A rooster crowed under the window, and he wakened like a puppy, all at once, scenting the day sharply.

The rest of the parsonage lay quiet under the brightening sky but the boy's room, washed through with the clean air, woke with him. In every corner but one. The low-hanging roof of the Swiss chalet still held its shadows there around a small curled-up figure on a cot. The boy moved from the window where the mountain tops were turning to gold, and as he advanced on the small figure, he seemed to blow the last shadows from dark corners.

"Wake up, Auguste," and whether he would or not, Auguste had to awake. He stretched shivering to pull back his blankets.

"Please, please, Louis," he begged, "it is not time."

"It is time." Louis was inexorable. "I am up."

And so Auguste knew that it was time, and he got up. But before he had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, Louis was dressed and racing down the stairs. Auguste looked at his stripped cot a moment, but then he sighed and began to pull on his clothes.

Outside, the yard had the curiously empty feeling of early dawn as if all sleeping things had taken away with them the essence of themselves and left behind nothing but their quiet bodies. The great apricot tree stood pale as moonlight in the dawn, alive only in its fragrance.

When the door of the house opened, the yard woke as if the boy's vitality, like the wind pouring down the mountain, had roused whatever it touched. He moved swiftly and surely, and the apricot tree hummed with the bees at work, small squeaks and chatters rose from tiers of slatted boxes, and the clear water of the great stone basin rippled with the silver backs of fish.

The boy's competent fingers unfastened each cage, selected with precision the proper food, and moved to the next in steady rotation. Mice, rabbits, birds, guinea pigs, snakes, fed and somehow greeted by the keen dark eyes bent upon them, fell to satisfied munching. Now and then Louis drew a homemade book from his wide pocket and made brief notes of new arrivals or of oldest inhabitants. Once he made a quick sketch, intent eyes on a crawling snail, and nodded with satisfaction at the result.

As he sprinkled fish food over the pool he suddenly became aware that everything in his household had had its breakfast except himself. Almost he could have finished the fish food himself. He flung it at the leaping fish, and ran.

At the door he passed Auguste on his way to the yard. "I gave your collections no food at all," he said. "If they are to live and grow, you must take care of them."

Auguste was hungry, too, but he went on to his corner of the yard.

Then Louis laughed. Laughed because of the beauty of the new day, and the strong life that ran in his veins, and the disgruntled face of his young brother. When his laughter rang out a chaffinch in the apricot tree burst into song and instantly Louis whistled the song back to him. Auguste broke into a canter and when the door had slammed, he whistled too, but the chaffinch paid no attention to him.

In the clean warm kitchen Louis pulled up a chair to the scrubbed table. The stout woman who helped his mother gave him his hot rolls while she stirred about the business of real breakfast. He talked companionably to her and ate rolls and honey and sweet butter, and drank large glasses of creamy milk. Auguste joined him and the two boys finished the basket of rolls while they discussed the day ahead of them. The Swiss woman groaned but she filled the basket again and set the pitcher of milk where they could reach it. Rose Agassiz saw to it that these boys had plenty to grow on. The little family that she had lost in the hard north still haunted her. These children of the sunny vineyards should have every chance.

Louis sniffed at the rich aroma of chocolate simmering on the stove for the family breakfast. "One small drop," he begged, and then needed another roll and honey for the chocolate. Auguste sighed. He could never hold as much as Louis.

The sun was over the mountains and had swung the clear day into its course when the boys raced down the shore of the lake of Morat. The fishermen who were dawdling over their boats straightened into activity. "Here, but here!" they called, beckoning, waving ends of nets, pointing to their fine red sails. Auguste slipped into the nearest boat where he watched his brother. Again that vitality poured out and got its response. Dark faces, gesticulating bodies, gay French greetings, the shore was alive in its competition for the pastor's son. When Louis chose the boat which had saved him a perfect shell, Auguste smiled a little apologetically at his sailor. He knew that nothing he could offer would rouse the laughter, the activity, the very luck with fish, which would follow that other boat sailing out into the sun.

By the middle of the morning they were back again, Louis with a new trick at catching fish and two odd specimens for his pool. Auguste was already in the quiet dark study, his fair head bent over the day's lesson. Louis rubbed the fish scales from his hands and reached for a book which might help him with his new find. His father waited until the lad had identified his fish. "Latin now," he said, and the day's lessons started. Auguste nodded now and then, for the sun and wind on the water had been strong. But Louis sprang at his problems with the zest of a sharp mind, well-rested and longing for exercise.

"Not so quick, pas si vite," the pastor warned that he might not show his pride. "Some day you will leap so hard on a wrong conclusion that you will ache well," But slowness was not in Louis. And of all his pupils whom the pastor taught with consummate skill and deep love of it, not one could touch his son. When he spoke of this brilliant child to his wife, she did not rebuke him for his worldly pride. "We must find ways to feed his mind as well as his body," she said, and fell to thinking of the ways.

Louis was ten years old this spring, and when the fall vacation was over he must enter a real school. They had done well by him at home. He had all the strength that those earlier frail children had lacked, his mother's heart was at rest about his health. Now he must have the stronger meat which his mind craved. She called to him when he left the study.

"Louis, my son, would you like to enter the College of Bienne when it opens again?"

Louis flung his arms around his mother's waist. "Ah, ma mère, I would like it better than anything in the world."

If in his eagerness to try a new world he forgot to regret the old, his mother showed no hurt. She brushed the fish scales from her skirt and smiled, understanding her son. "It is settled then," she said and went on with the ways and means of his departure from her.

Through the long June afternoon two young figures, intent, cautious, crept along the lakeshore. It was no game of pirates which held them to their course. Each boy swung a milk pail on his arm, a pail which grew heavier as he went on. Out of the golden heat into dripping caves where the water was green around their knees and they had to bend to see the small creatures who lived in it. Quick as a humming bird's flash, and from Louis the sound of the satisfied hunter. Out again into the sunshine where under rocks piled against the lake wall a fish might reasonably expect privacy, their quick fingers pried and captured. If at times Auguste looked wistfully at a stretch of clean dry sand, he expected no encouragement from Louis. Rest was not in the boy.

At last he straightened from a weedy pool and in one swift stretching motion shed his few clothes. This was the part of the hunt for which Auguste waited. With long slow strokes the boys slipped as silently through the water as the fish they sought. Then flat and still on the surface while Louis made odd crooning noises in his throat and moved his fingers lightly as if beckoning in the water. The fingers closed, the white young body tread erect, and thrust upward, a wet hand like a boy fountain holding his fish. Auguste stopped his futile waggling and paddled beside Louis while they examined the fish. It had stopped struggling in the firm grasp. Louis opened his fingers and the fish swam unhurriedly away.

"Go," said Louis, "and trouble me no more. I have dozens of you. See, Auguste, this is the way you do it," and he turned again on his back.

But Auguste had discovered that the sun was low, and that a lake fed from the Oberland was still cold in June, and that he was hungry. When Auguste made up his sturdy mind to differ from his brother, Louis knew better than to object. He swam toward the shore. It was, after all, chilly and he was suddenly devoured by hunger. But tomorrow he would surely teach Auguste to catch his fish alive.

Supper was a leisurely meal in the pastor's family. At the end of the long June day while it was still so light that they needed no candles, they sat about the big table and told the day over to each other. The two little girls, brushed and clean, sat at their end of the table quietly attentive. Experience had taught them their role. They ate the wild strawberries which they had patiently picked in the sweet-smelling pastures, and looked at each other with pleasure when Louis asked for a third dish of them. They listened intently to his tale of the new fish for the aquarium.

"I will draw it for you tomorrow," Cecile said. "It will be less difficult than this troublesome mouse," She held up a sketch from the pile by her plate. The father took it, examined it, and passed it down to Louis and Auguste at their end of the table.

They looked at it and Auguste shook his head. "I would have no notion that it was a mouse," he said. But Louis flashed his brilliant smile down the table at Cecile. "You have the joints just right," he said, "the rest will come."

"I am better at landscapes," she sighed, "but I am sure that I can do your fish."

"We will look at it together after supper," promised Louis, and Cecile had the comfortable feeling that the fish would be right because Louis always knew the important details to point out to her.

"My doll's shoes are not finished," Olympe said firmly.

"They shall be," Louis assured her, "but while it is light we must examine the fish. I will make them exactly like the shoes that the traveling shoemaker made for you last week. You shall see."

Olympe could see the perfect little shoes already on her doll's feet. Louis could do anything. All he had to do was to watch with those intent eyes of his, the tailor, the cooper, the shoemaker, and in a few days her dolls had profited. She could afford to wait.

Supper was finished and the pastor again gave reverent thanks for the bountiful food. But when they rose, Auguste still sat with his head bowed. Louis laughed and ran a long finger down the bent neck. Auguste stumbled to his feet and spoke thickly through his sleep. "The fish . . ." he said, "the fish . . . the fish . . ." and then because he could not remember what he meant to say about the fish, he said good night with the dignity of a sleepwalker and climbed the stairs. When Louis came to bed an hour later, the shoes finished, his brother in the darkened corner under the eaves did not stir to the quickening of a breath at his greeting.

In a few minutes the candle was out and the room as silent as if it were empty. Yet the feeling of life filled it with its presence, rich and plentiful life drawn into the two young bodies from the cool air, and the quiet, and the watchful house which sheltered them. The rhythm of renewal and of growth caught them up and swept them on toward the next dawn when the sun should ride high over the mountains.

AWAY up in the Jura mountains at the beginning of the nineteenth century lay a small valley. It was remote from any of the thrifty Swiss villages of the countryside, it was barren, the bitter cold of the winter softened only to penetrating chill in the summer, it was a small lost valley where men found it hard to live.

But the Swiss do not easily capitulate to hardship nor did they leave St. Imier because it presented such problems in living that some of them could find no solution and died. They struggled along with their scanty crops on weekdays, and on Sundays went to church for the much needed encouragement of the Lord and of their pastor. If the pastor, cold, ill-nourished, found such encouragement hard to deliver, they called another man, and somehow they always found their minister. A young man, perhaps, in his early twenties who had a young wife still in her teens, and who was sure that given a little practical experience, no parish in Switzerland would be closed to him. With high hopes and little else the young pair could face this bleak valley because the time would be so short.

For those first years of the century young pastor Agassiz shepherded his mountain flock. Beside him labored Rose, his wife, labored at her tasks, and at bearing and losing children. One after another the babies came, struggled feebly, and went away again. When they had said the prayers for the dead over the fourth small grave, Rose and Rudolphe faced the dreary future. They could bear St. Imier no longer. It had taken the freshness of their life together and the heavy toll of their young family. Empty-handed as they came, they left.

As intolerable situations have a way of ending themselves when they are grappled, so the new life began to make up for the old. The parish of Motier was neither rich nor large, but it was a land of promise to the weary young pair. Almost like a fair island with the lakes and river bounding it and furnishing it shelter and fine growing soil. The vineyards were thick and green when they settled into the new parsonage, and in the yard a great apricot tree lifted fragrant blooms to the very sky. Rose felt the blood warm again in her chilled veins. Her bereft youth breathed the sunny air and flickered into hope that life still held something sweet for her.

The loneliness of the bleak valley with its little graves was a bad dream. Here she felt safe with her father, the good Doctor Mayor, at Cudrefin only a few miles away and in their own parish. For Rudolphe, the pastor, it was home land, too, with friends on every hillside ready to welcome him back. The parsonage was roomy and comfortable with sunshiny rooms where children could thrive. The wan young wife bloomed again into health and a quiet happiness growing from maturity which never left her.

On a spring day, May 28, 1807, the baby was born, the fifth child and yet the first, the real beginning of new life for Rose. A boy with a fine strong body and eyes of the dark blue that turns to brown, their eldest child now. They called him Jean Louis Rudolphe Agassiz when they baptized him, and Louis when they talked to him. They had no way of knowing that they had bestowed and were using a name of such greatness that the whole world would finally speak it. But his mother, Rose, though she had an inkling of what was to come, still felt the shadows of the dead too close. She dedicated herself to the care of this child. She set to work to earn those long years of rich companionship which lay ahead of her until she left her son in the ripe fullness of her years.

Yet with all her fears, Rose Agassiz was a wise mother. She had learned what children need when she had none of it to give them. Fresh air, sunshine, plenty of good food, and freedom to work and to play she allowed her children. For in two years there was another baby, the fair-haired Auguste, who tried from his first gurgle to make it sound like the adored Louis. Then a girl, and then another girl, sound and splendid children, who slept and ate and cried and laughed when they should, and who all grew up together in the usual way. Usual, except that one of them to his mother's mind was not a usual child. Her eldest son seemed to her as one set apart. She treated them impartially but this boy she watched and brooded over.

In those days the intelligence quotient was still an unknown quantity. There was no way of measuring children except by the opinion of a mother like Rose Agassiz who with other mothers might conceivably be mistaken in the estimate of her child. Not much was known about the curious business of inheritance whereby a child may turn into a small replica of an unknown or a too well-known ancestor. Nobody knew exactly how important a bearing on his future a boy's environment could have, or if those splendid shining mountains helped him to climb the hills of life.

But Rose Agassiz knew certain truths without waiting for them to be discovered. She needed no measurements to know that her boy would exceed almost all that might be applied to him. She had no texts to help her to direct his active mind, but she seemed to need none. Louis liked to make collections. So did dozens of other boys, but the collections of Louis were ordered from an inner need to know. They took form according to that need. His mother knew that these were no ordinary collections. They were the first sure steps of genius which could walk before it crept. She made room for his collections in her clean Swiss house and yard, and encouraged him to search for more. She allowed him to turn the great Alpine boulder which was the parsonage fountain into an aquarium for his fish. She set aside part of her orderly yard for his boxes where he bred and watched animals of strange odors and sounds. She turned and made over her clothes until they would turn no more, and then fashioned them into neat frocks for the girls. A new book for Louis meant long saving. A pastor with four children could lay aside little money, and his wife must do her part.

On her early fears for the boy's health, she built the plan of his education and the child could have fared worse with a happier foundation. For the first ten years of his life Louis had as modern a training as ever came hot from the most radical experimental-school curriculum. Though here luck was with him. If his father had been no better teacher than preacher, the boy might have been slowed down by their constant association. But Rudolphe Agassiz was an inspired teacher, a rare gift of God to the child who feels its contact. If Louis inherited that fine touch, or if he came by it through his association with it, is a matter of speculation, but he too could teach with that effortless clarity with which his father made the pursuit of learning one of its greatest rewards. His mother might urge him to search with sharpened senses, but his father could teach him of what other men, greater than he, had discovered. Perhaps Louis' first real piece of good fortune was in the parents who raised him.

As for the parents, a young genius in the family may be considered good fortune or not. However dearly they love him or deeply admire him, he tunes life in too high a key for most of them to reach. He sets a pace which leaves the others far behind. He finds, as he must, his own desires and needs more important than those of anybody else. A genius is too absorbed in the drive which makes him outstrip others to attend to much of anything else. It is a strong wind behind him, and a fair prospect ahead of him, and all of life must be used for its purpose. If its demands upon his vitality are too great, he is no genius.

But of the vitality of Louis Agassiz there was no end. Four births and deaths had not depleted his inheritance. It was as if his mother had been saving it all for him. And now she was hard put to it at times to guard that activity. Hers was never the dry monotony of discovering new projects to quiet the drone of, "What can I do next, mother?" Active as her own imagination was, she could never quite forestall that of her son's. It is to her everlasting credit that her early fears did not curb her boy into a state of frustration or, since he had that genius which could not be suppressed, a state of rebellion which would have troubled his warm affectionate nature almost as much.

Again and again the mother's endurance was tested. The lake froze through the long cold winters and the children skated as easily as they ran. There was the day when the pastor drove around the lake to the fair in town. The tales which the seven-year Louis heard about the fair convinced him that he should see it. He and Auguste could easily skate across and drive back with father. He and Auguste did skate across, and they came to a wide fissure in the ice just as their mother, searching the white distance with her glass, discovered them, small valiant explorers. As she watched – and how her very breath must have choked her! – one child seemed to fall. If Louis had gone through the ice, no one could reach him now. Then down crept the other boy, a mere baby, and she saw that Louis had made a bridge of his strong young body in order that Auguste might cross. They rose and skated on, hand in hand.

It was then that Rose Agassiz did give her boy a taste of bitter frustration. For the swift skater whom she sent after her children reached them just as they came to the shore, and dragged them ruthlessly back with him to the parsonage. No sight of the fair and no drive home with the pastor; only a tired little brother who cried a great deal, and a mother who was queerly white and silent. Even if in later years Louis understood his mother's terror, he must have been filled with fury then. For he always remembered the incident.

Rose Agassiz saw, too, that her eldest son was born with that gift which makes or breaks a human being according to the fiber of which he is formed. She knew that the fiber was strong, tough in its resistance from both sides of his inheritance. Three hundred years of men and women who had weathered harsh living in the Swiss Alps, who had been doctors for bodies and souls for generations, who decided right and wrong after deep thought and hard struggle, and who lived up to their own standards. She could reasonably expect that Louis would be no weakling, but it might well be that not one of those strong and righteous ancestors had needed to watch the pitfalls that this other gift would set for young Louis. She could not know that it possibly was she, herself, who had passed his defense on to him.

For Louis had that dangerous, lovely quality which we call charm without knowing exactly what we mean by it. Part of it lay in his intense vitality which drove him into constant and splendid activity, and which might well have its source in the adequate service that his glands offered him. But more than one active person has presented no more attraction than a boomerang.

He was, as now and again we say of boy or man, a born leader. But bullies are sometimes born leaders, and cruel men, and hated men. Louis was a leader because, perforce, people would follow him. His mother watched him with the other boys and saw that they were eager for his direction, and that the direction was amazingly wise. This lad had to be first, but his leadership was not of a gang of mischief makers. He somehow, through his own belief in their exciting quality, made these Swiss peasant boys excited about worthless objects like fish which you ate, and stones and shells which you walked on. If an undamaged specimen made Louis' dark eyes glow and his voice vibrant while he explained it, then undamaged specimens were worth the search. Nor were those hardy outdoor boys to be fooled into listening to sugar-coated lessons. Louis was no teacher to them but the boy who could swim farther, wrestle better, run faster, eat more and laugh harder than any one of them. Why not keep at his heels, and if they lost sight of him as he forged ahead of them, why not wait for him to come into range again? After all a leader has to have some freedom for projects of his own which need concentration, and Louis always came back with some new and undreamed value to heighten life for them.

Rose Agassiz saw this uneven relationship which has turned steadier heads than a child's, and has bred resentment in older hearts than a boy's, but she saw that for Louis it was only a means to a profound urge toward something which neither of them understood just yet, but which would not harm the young leader or his followers. Louis would always be a leader because of that quality which made people follow him, that intangible grace which is grace only when it is unconscious. His mother saw a boy so engrossed in his interests that he had small room for personal vanity or self-aggrandizement, and she did not try to curb him. His alert attention and desire to find out about things would always displace any trace of self-consciousness. And therein lay, perhaps, a share of his charm. An outgoing, friendly boy who was to grow into an outgoing, friendly man.

The boy approached human beings much as he did his specimens with a passionate hope that here might be something new and interesting. Few people, young or old, can resist this tribute to their personality. An honest expectation is likely to meet with a degree of fulfilment. There was nothing devious about this broad-shouldered fair-faced Swiss boy. He had no fear of older, wiser people because they were after all in his gifted class. He had only eagerness to learn from them the wisdom which a few extra years had allowed them to acquire. And all through his youth older and wiser people gave generously to Louis Agassiz, seeming to value greatly the respect and admiration of the brilliant boy. If he used his charm to get what he wanted from them, it was not evident to them, nor to him. Here was a boy whose clear dark eyes met theirs as an equal, and yet who asked most humbly and honestly for what they had to give. In return he gave quite simply anything which he had found out for himself, neither undervaluing his contribution nor overestimating it. They wished him well, and saw to it whenever they could that he should be put a little further on his way.

Rose Agassiz realized the need for satisfying the unquenchable thirst of her son, and knew that it was time for him to go. His body was strong and sound, thanks to her watchful care. His mind was alert and thoughtful, thanks to his father. Now he needed direction. Like most brilliant boys, he could do anything well. His interests were scattered rather than deep. Before his life had conformed to a pattern of diffuseness, he must be sent away to a school where the impersonal direction would help him to focus. The College of Bienne was only twenty miles away and a minister's son could live cheaply there. Louis was now ten years old but his mother had tested the maturity of his mind and she knew that she could trust him away from her.

When the new term opened after the fall vacation, Louis was ready to go. Clean pressed clothes, cheeks red with excitement and scrubbing, dark eyes on fire, the boy drove away from her almost forgetting to wave good-bye in his eagerness to push on to his new experience. Rose Agassiz turned back to comfort the bereft Auguste with the promise that he should follow in another year. But her mind and heart were with the lad who drove briskly along the lake road with his grandfather toward his first high goal.

THE road was gray with the dawn and empty of all life except when the hedges stirred with the flutter of fall birds gathering enough food to last for a long day of their migration. Out of a cloud of dust and early morning mist trudged two young figures, well-grown, sturdy boys deep in talk which seemed important to both of them. Now and then it was abruptly broken by the sudden departure of the older boy on a jaunt of his own to investigate a bird note or wing annoyingly unlike its way in the spring. The fair-haired younger boy waited patiently in the dust, his thoughts going on with his interrupted speech. Then he would speak, looking absently at his brother's dew-wet shoes on which the fresh dust caked.

"We must move along without so many stops. We have far to go. And much to be decided at the end of our journey." His face was anxious. "You are too light-hearted, Louis. Have you no regrets at leaving Bienne? Or no fears about what they will decide for us at home? If it were I, there would be no cause for worry because I should like to enter the great commercial house of my Uncle François. I would make a good clerk for him. But you . . ."

Louis watched the bushes stir a moment more before he spoke. "Auguste, I have made my plans," he turned grave eyes on his brother, "and now is no time for fears. I shall never make a good clerk for mon oncle. And you must help me to escape."

Auguste trudged on. "What can we do? Who will listen to you, scarcely fifteen years old?"

Louis' eyes lightened with laughter. "They will all listen. I have already written them that I wish to advance in the sciences, and told them what I should need to carry out my plans up to the time I shall be twenty-five. That is far enough to plan ahead." His laughter broke out, young, infectious.

Auguste shook his head. "How can you alone convince them of your need?"

"I shall not convince them with my word alone. See what I have taken pains to collect." He held out a small packet of letters which one by one Auguste read intently.

"From the headmaster, himself! And all of these teachers! Louis, what fine things they say about you!" Auguste burned with pride. "You have small need of my help."

Louis swooped and snatched a small unwary snake from its dusty crossing of the road. The snake stopped writhing and submitted to his careful inspection. Louis laid it down where it meant to go and rubbed his hands dry on his stockings.

"You will talk a great deal about my successes, and a little of how poor I am in the mathematics which a good clerk needs. We will show them these notebooks which are indeed heavy to carry but which I would not trust to grandfather's old white horse when he comes for our bags. We will show them our records, for yours are good, too, and we must go on together for a while," He hugged his brother's shoulders with his free arm. "Now that we have had the four years at Bienne, we should have no regrets. There is still Lausanne, isn't there?"

Auguste looked as if his heart had unaccountably lifted. But his voice was still doubtful. "With no money? And shall you not miss Bienne where we have been so happy?"

Louis nodded carelessly. "Bienne has given us all that it could and we have grown on it. We know now how to study nine hours a day, and not tire with it. It was sad, too, to let my birds and snakes and excellent fall tadpoles go. But there will be more at Lausanne."

Auguste wondered at his assurance, and found that in spite of himself he shared it. His spirits rose with the sun and he kicked briskly through the dust without his usual caution. They were crossing the tedious Seeland now, but already Louis was sniffing at the sharper air.

"The grapes!" he cried. "I smell the vineyards! Tomorrow the roads will be filled with the vendangeurs. And we shall be there before the first one. Now, Auguste . . ." and they fell to planning their share in the "vendanges" as boys without a care in the world would do.

Many times during their four years at Bienne they had traveled their twenty miles home along this dusty road with no thought of fatigue. At least on the way home! Sometimes it seemed unaccountably long on the way back. Never long when they were tramping toward the grape gathering at Motier. This time Louis meant to arrive early enough to have the family council over and to leave him with a free heart for celebration. He was, then, pleased when late in the afternoon after the bread and cheese of lunch were quite forgotten, he saw ambling up the road toward them grandfather's little white horse who had learned in all his years of doctoring not to hurry unless in an emergency.

The boys climbed into the buggy, one on each side of the old doctor, and found it very pleasant to sit down. Louis piled his notebooks on his grandfather's lap and held the reins while Dr. Mayor looked at them. He kept up a running fire of explanation until the old man gently remonstrated. "Be quiet, my son, and watch your driving. The small horse knows the way, but he is not used to these excited jerks. And after all, I, myself, know something of the subjects you have recorded," He turned over the pages filled with fine, stencil-clear writing. He approved the accurate drawings. "They are excellent," he agreed. "And now Auguste, we will look at yours."

Auguste looked up at his grandfather with honest surprise. "My notebooks? Oh, they are of no importance! I left them with our bags for you to bring when next you go to Bienne." Then as if he had recalled a sudden idea, "You see, grandfather, I am not like Louis who sees so clearly and records so accurately. He is the gifted one. All of the teachers . . ."

"What nonsense!" Louis' voice was so sharp that Auguste peered around his grandfather to see if he could believe his ears. Hadn't Louis told him what to say? "What nonsense! Auguste is gifted in a different way. You cannot make notebooks of mathematical problems. It is only that I am older and that I have been at Bienne a year longer." He looked so fiery that Auguste shrank back. Then his voice softened. "Now you may go on, mon frère, with what you were about to say."

Out of Auguste's confusion rose faltering phrases to which Dr. Mayor listened with eyes that twinkled. Louis listened, too, first with anxiety, then as the tale grew more incoherent, with laughter.

"Enough, Auguste, enough! Good as I am, you would spoil my chance," Poor Auguste gave up and sank behind his grandfather's broad shoulder. "You see," Louis explained, "I told Auguste to speak highly of me. It is hard for him, but I can tell you myself if you will give me your attention."

The doctor stopped chuckling as the boy went on to explain his plans. Two years at the College of Lausanne which were to be shared by Auguste who had as remarkable ability for figures as he, Louis, had for languages and science. Then a German university, and finally the future of a naturalist and man of letters. As the boy went on, producing his reasons with clarity and decision, he realized that his grandfather was treating the situation with the respect due to an older person. His confidence rose at the outcome of this first issue. When his grandfather spoke, he listened with the absorbed attention which always won the approval of his elders.

"This is all very well," the old man said, "and I can see that you are not cut out for business. But after all, a man must earn his way and your plans do not include this item." Louis started to interrupt, then shut his lips firmly. "Behind you on the one side are generations of ministers, and on the other generations of physicians. Would neither of these honorable professions suit you?"

Louis considered. "No," he decided, "but of the two I would rather be a famous doctor like Uncle Mathias."

"Very well," agreed his grandfather. "Mathias will come to Motier for the festival. Your parents and you," as if he suddenly realized that the boy was his own best advocate, "shall discuss the matter with him and we will come to a conclusion."

Louis leaned back with a deep satisfied breath. As far as he was concerned the matter was settled. He knew that he had Grandfather's support, and Uncle Mathias always managed the parents. Louis realized shrewdly that money only was the reason for their hesitation and he was confident that he could earn the little that he would need. The study of medicine would not take him far afield from his intended direction. Yes, Louis was satisfied. He now prepared to enjoy the vendanges which would begin tomorrow.

"Grandfather, Auguste has a song and I have learned a new dance . . ." the future was bounded by tomorrow's limits. Auguste came out from behind the big shoulder, and the small white horse pranced into the parson's yard.

They were all there, a family which seized upon any excuse to gather together. Louis glowed with love for them all, especially his mother whose arms stayed around him perhaps a trifle longer than the shyer Auguste. Yet it was beside his uncle Mathias that Louis managed to secure a place when they drew their chairs up to the long supper table. And it was to him that he talked though he could not help noticing that the others listened, too. Once he left the table to bring a notebook that he might make clear his point to his uncle. There was hardly room to put it on the table so loaded was it with good Swiss food which Aunt Lisette, famous for her cooking, had helped to prepare. Louis did not allow his lecture to interfere with the satisfaction of an enormous appetite. His mother smiled affectionately at the vigorous attacks of his mind and his body.

Auguste, who was tired now, would have postponed the critical question of their future, but he knew no way to stop Louis once he had set out to overcome an obstacle. Anyway he seemed to need no help, and Auguste leaned sleepily against the shoulder of his uncle François. Whatever they decided would suit him, warmed and comforted by the good food. He heard them as from a long way off.

As Louis had intended, the real decision had been reached when they rose from the table. His doctor uncle had been genuinely impressed by the boy's knowledge of anatomy and by his ability to classify what he knew. While Auguste climbed the stairs to his old cot under the eaves, Dr. Mathias and Louis swooped the cloth from the end of the table and made room for the rest of the notebooks. When they had finished Louis gave a mighty yawn and bade them all good night. He could safely leave the issue with Dr. Mathias who was even now talking earnestly with the parents. Grandfather nodded over his pipe but Louis was sure of his help if any difficulty arose. Lausanne with special work in anatomy from his uncle, who had an excellent practice in the city; it was settled. Louis slept soundly.

The fall days had shortened and the sky was still dark next morning when the windows of the parsonage shone yellow with lamplight. The whole household was astir making ready for the arrival of the grape laborers. Soon they would come pouring in from the cantons around the Lake of Neuchâtel and the picking and crushing of the grapes would begin. Even Louis was not ahead of Aunt Lisette in the kitchen this morning.

The clear edges of the mountains and the keenness of the frosty air gave promise of perfect grape weather. The women shooed the boys out of the great kitchen. Cooking on a large scale had begun, and Louis knew that already the cellar was well filled with bread and cakes and fresh cheeses and cold meats. He tested them while he waited for breakfast, and then ate with no dulled appetite the rolls and honey and chocolate. "It is no wonder that you grow fast," his Aunt Lisette told him, but she poured him a special glass of rich milk.

With the gold bright dawn the dimmed lamps were put out and the first pickers came singing up the road from Berne. The boys heard them while they were still specks on the road and ran to meet them. "Has Carl, has Alex, has Max, has Emmy, has Anna yet come?" The road rang with their shouts. "Are we the first? Tell Mary to meet us in the lower vineyard. . . ." Even Louis with his genius for classification found it hard to put in order these groups of friends who perhaps saw each other only in vineyard time.

Soon the fragrance of the grapes hung sweet in the air. Soon great baskets of heavy fruit, purple, white, amber, ready for anyone filled shady corners. Soon pitchers of fresh grape juice cooled the thirsty laborers. Soon voices called greetings from vineyard to vineyard. Vendanges had swung into its rhythm. It swung to the rhythm of song and of laughter and of steady hands moving from vine to basket; to the gaiety of spirit which underlies the French-Swiss temperament. Grape picking was no more work than marching to the music of a stirring band.

Yet at the end of the long day everyone, even Louis, was ready to stop. For the last hour the savory odors from the kitchen and from the long board tables outside had won them away from the fragrance of the grapes. The parson always fed his guests well. When the horn yodeled down the long vineyard arches, there was sudden silence, and then the rush and scramble which mean that men are hungry.

Rose Agassiz would allow none of the women pickers to help. They were hungry and tired, too. Her two young daughters, Cecile and Olympe, sweet in their fresh clothes and with neatly braided hair, undisturbed by all the confusion, stood ready to serve the long tables. Girls from the village ran back and forth at their word. In the kitchen their mother directed her helpers with quiet competence, and Aunt Lisette commanded the great oven. Out in the yard the parson stood at his end of a long table with his two sons who had worked all day on either side of him while he offered grace over the bowed heads. Grandfather and Grandmother Mayor were serene and gracious at their table, and the two uncles kept spirits high wherever their voices could reach. Abundance of everything, good food and drink, friendliness, and well-being. Louis was glad through his hunger that he belonged with these people. He joined with a voice that shifted unexpectedly from high to low in the songs, and enjoyed his own singing as heartily as if he could depend upon it. Was it not a sign of coming manhood which had no indication in the high treble of Auguste across the table? He ate as if he would never be done!

The great platters were well emptied, the sky was darkening, the air tingled without chilling bodies warmed by good food and drink, when the real singing began. One by one, first a rich deep baritone, then the high soprano of a woman's voice, answered to the calls of the crowd who joined zestfully with a chorus which seemed to rise to the black mountain peaks. The young treble of the boy, Auguste, ended the song-fest with its clear yodel. Louis listened pridefully. He knew that his turn would come later.

The frost in the air hurried them all into the big barn hung with dim lanterns, and sweet with new hay. The floor was brushed clean and from a great hayrick the musicians tuned up their strings. A startled cow lowed softly and stumbled to her feet, and under the floor a pig snorted. But soon no one could hear them through the shuffle of feet and the laughter. Even the lanterns swayed. Only the strong could have danced thus at the end of a day in the vineyards.

The parson's children, Olympe, Cecile, even Auguste, had slipped away exhausted, but Louis was still stepping out with the prettiest of the village maidens when he saw the great ring begin to form about the barn. Hand in hand, sliding slowly in a wide revolving circle, calling his name. He sprang into the center of the moving ring and it slowed and stopped. A handsome, straight young figure on whom more than one village girl looked with favor, a boy of whom anyone might be proud. Louis was proud, himself, and full of gaiety and zest no whit depleted by the long day. "Is the lad never tired?" his mother thought through weariness which lightened with her pride as she watched her son. His dance was like him, with a strong grace and fire which won a long hand of applause. Even Louis was satisfied with the response, though he would have gladly stayed on and danced to its tune with the girls for another hour.

But the floors of the barn and sheds were for sleeping now instead of dancing, and the haylofts turned into soft beds. Lanterns burned out, a horse snuffled comfortably at the quiet, the cow sank back again on her knees into her straw, the rhythm of the first day of vendanges had swung into silence.

THE Bienne experiment had proved successful. Both of the boys had waxed strong on hard work and plain living. For the first time Louis had been pitted against competitors who had some of his own vigor and quickness of mind. The lads from the Vaudois region were keen and active, too. If Louis stood high among them, he had to work for his place. Probably nothing better could have happened to him in the formative years from ten to fourteen. No longer could he carry his leadership unquestioned as it had been by the village boys. Louis had to be first, but now he kept his place through work on which he throve.

Again, as with his father, Louis had the benefit of what we call our modern ideas in education. Instead of settling down to five hours of heavy-footed work which end with fatigue and boredom, the boys at Bienne carried nine hours of study hardily with their intervals of play and freedom. They scarcely knew when they drifted from the one to the other. His preparation with his father made Louis at home with this kind of work, and placed him at once on a level with the rest of his class. He needed no handicaps given him after the years spent in the parson's study at Motier.

Both Bienne and Lausanne stressed what were termed the classics, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian. Louis was an expert with languages, a gift which had a good deal to do with his career. Because he could speak and use German like a native, he chose German universities where science was at its height. Without his Latin his passion for classification would have been thwarted. Louis made use of everything he knew. When he needed to find out something new, he wasted no time about it. The boys sometimes got discouraged by the way he always caught up with them. No lead was sure if Louis became interested in it!

Yet at the end of these four years at Bienne where the emphasis had been on the classics, the driving force which sent Louis on to Lausanne was the magic of natural history. Never could he find out enough about the earth, and the life of its land and sea. Never could he rest while their mysteries were unanswered. Never was he so alive, so completely himself, as when all of his power, like a strong searchlight, was turned on their solution. Yet never, and here probably was the characteristic which made him a great teacher, did he shut himself away to brood, as scientists have done, over discoveries. From his boyhood he shared his rich life, pouring out his gains and his losses with such enchantment that audiences waited breathless for Louis Agassiz. Too often, as his father had warned him, he was to leap so hard on a wrong conclusion that he would ache well. But no pain could teach him, boy or man, to be miserly with his gifts.

The Agassiz children were growing up. The girls needed no elaborate education, but Cecile was talented and should have some art training. Even in a small village like Motier a girl must have pretty clothes, something to set off her youth. The parson's salary was small and often eked out with provisions instead of money. To continue to send the two boys to college meant constant planning, constant scrimping; it meant that a whole family must see ahead far enough to realize that the end was worth the struggle.

It was a wise and gentle family from which the vigorous Louis sprang. They all knew that it was reasonable to expect the eldest boy to help out as soon as possible. They all knew that no boy could have a better beginning than was offered Louis with his Uncle François. But they knew, too, through some alchemy by which Rose Agassiz transmuted her thoughts into theirs, that Louis was a genius, not a business man.

Louis himself never considered anything else than science which was fortunate in view of his light-hearted way of handling money all his life. What he had, he expected to share with anyone who needed it; what others had, he expected them to share with him if he needed it. When he was faced with any project which needed money, a microscope or a museum, he told people of his need and such was his conviction and his charm of manner, that the listener became convinced and, sometimes to his own amazement, gave the needed sum. For Louis Agassiz, money was of value only as he could spend it, not always wisely, on the urgencies of something so much greater than himself that he had no personal needs beside it. Not an asset for a business man! Not always for a man of science, but to all human beings, then and now, struggling out of the darkness of ignorance, an imperishable gift.

In their wisdom, then, the Agassiz family with Rose to lead them, pinched a little closer and worked a little harder now, that the eldest boy might prepare himself for the long future when he would repay their sacrifices, not to them, but to a world which needed it more. Because Auguste was too young for Uncle François, Louis' power of persuasion won for him, too, a year or two more of school life. Perhaps Rose Agassiz saw how much her brilliant, hot-headed boy needed the balance of his brother.

Lausanne was settled for both boys, then. Louis, the country boy, country schooled, brought the freshness of his vision to a college where, for the first time, it could measure the work of real scientists. As so many of his professors were to do, Chavannes, the entomologist, took an immediate liking to the vivid, eager lad. Louis had never seen a real museum made by adults who considered with respect the business of collecting that so fascinated him. It was a small canton museum, directed by Professor Chavannes, and to Louis it was one of the wonders of the world. Find a director who will not respond to that feeling about his dear project! Chavannes gave Louis access to the museum at once, and never, so far as one knows, did he regret it.

Nor was Chavannes alone in his generosity. Again and again as Louis forged his way through universities, he was to meet this response to the magic of his personality, though doubtless his professors thought it due to his scholarship. But never, perhaps, did it count more toward his progress than during these early years when his career depended upon it. Jean de Charpentier, a fine and sensitive scholar, a man who had reverence for latent powers of a boy, encouraged Louis too in his convictions about his future. These men talked him over together, Chavannes, the uncle Dr. Mayor, and de Charpentier, talked him over, and talked with him. Louis knew now that he must become a naturalist. Life could offer him nothing else so rich.

It was quite another thing, he found, to make his family believe in that sort of riches. They could not, after all, be expected to contrive and scrimp all their lives in order that the eldest son, who by now should be adding to their small income, might enjoy digging up strange fossils or classifying odd fish. He was brilliant, to be sure, but the world needed brilliant physicians perhaps more than anything else unless it might be brilliant ministers of the gospel, though Pastor Agassiz knew well that other qualities had been of more use to him. These other qualities may have made his conviction the more unshakable that Louis should adopt a profession which would bring him an adequate income. He little knew that Louis was never to define the word income. It was always outgo with him.

The boy was reasonable. He understood his father's point and his proud spirit resisted dependence. He suffered, too, from that handicap of most highly intelligent youngsters, he could do anything well. His uncle and his grandfather felt that here was a lad well equipped to honor the profession which had always belonged to his ancestors. Louis' long sensitive fingers could make a dissection almost as perfect as Dr. Mayor's when they worked together. The interest which Louis showed in anatomy, and his skill with its problems surely pointed to skill in medicine of which anatomy was the very foundation.

Somewhere in the equipment of genius resides a persistence which turns every opposition into an asset. It feeds itself with whatever it needs. It is an irresistible force which sacrifices everything to its own demands. It found without, perhaps, letting the boy know just yet, that anatomy and many other medical subjects would suit its ends better than most studies. It permitted Louis to agree with the proposition that he study medicine to provide himself with a proper career. And it allowed that decision in no way to interfere with its purpose. Louis was inescapably a naturalist, and nothing could deflect him.

Bienne, as Rose Agassiz expected, had served to direct the energies and interests of a mind which never in youth or age could limit itself in a truly scientific fashion. It trained her boy to the kind of hard work that made him unable all his life to tell where work left off and fun began, or how to enjoy the one more than the other. It treated him as an individual without spoiling him. It proved to the rest of the family, what she already knew, that Louis rated nothing less than the best. Just what that best would be, must largely be decided by the boy himself as, little by little, he found it out. The destiny of a whole life could not be settled by one ready-made plan. It must develop according to the need of that strange force which his mother may not have called genius but which she respected as such. At fifteen Louis was not ready for business; he was ready for Lausanne, and Lausanne he must have. When Lausanne was finished after two years more of brilliant records, the concept of Louis as a business man seemed to have been lost somewhere along the way. To be sure, since the boy was seventeen, he might reasonably be expected to consider a preparation for earning a living. But what more honorable and useful way of earning a living than ministering to the sick?

With no disagreement whatever, except from that hidden force within the boy which could bide its time and waste nothing, the whole family in all its generations agreed upon a medical training for Louis. A medical training meant the University of Zurich, a place which his mother must have felt well suited to his needs. Here he could see the world and realize a culture which was German in its foundation and broad in its scope. Here he would be especially equipped through his complete mastery of the German language to extract the best from the education he needed. Here he would find men who would stimulate him in the right direction. Though, right direction as Rose Agassiz saw it, pointed a different way from the implacable needle of the boy's inner compass which always held him to its true north.

Louis, who was easily guided along a way he intended to go anyway, accepted Zurich thankfully. Perhaps it was a relief to him, torn by conflicts about his future, to have the next two years of it settled for him. Who was he at seventeen to argue with his elders about a means to an end? He had the inner security that all means could be turned toward his ends before he was through with them. As far as he knew he had the best intentions toward a doctor's life when he entered Zurich. But meantime he had two long years to find out everything that Zurich could tell him about animals and plants and rocks which on the whole were much more interesting than diseases. Louis found the arrangement completely satisfactory especially as it included Auguste. The two boys could live together cheaply at a private house, though perhaps the landlady might have raised their rent if she had known that her pleasant room was to be turned into a zoo. Not that she ever complained. Louis probably made her so interested in his birds and beasts and fish that she wondered why she had not always used the room for a zoo. He taught by sharing his enjoyment with a sunny conviction of its value which proved irresistible to more than a landlady.

His seventeenth year, then, saw Louis settled in Zurich where the idea of medicine was to dim before the radiance of a natural world which offered endless exploration.

IT WAS not often given to the University of Zurich to be surprised. The students knew what to expect of the professors and the professors knew what to expect of the students. They had mutual respect for each other, they all worked hard together, and among them made Zurich a solid, rather grim, seat of learning. It was German in its thoroughness, its tongue, and its conviction that no other nationality knew anything about science. The German-Swiss mind which did the thinking of the place plodded patiently, slowly, joylessly toward its goal, satisfied with the business of reaching it. That the way might be illuminated into radiance and quickened into gaiety was as yet an idea wholly unrelated to that of scholar. Zurich was due to get its surprise.

Louis Agassiz stepped into the classrooms, his proud head high, his dark eyes friendly, laughter on his lips. Heads bent over microscopes lifted, and stared a little stolidly. It was touch and go as to whether this light-hearted lad should be ignored as a superficial outsider, or allowed to share the learning which the University cherished. But when had Louis ever been ignored? When had any temperament refused to succumb to him? Zurich had no chance in the world against its outsider!

For not for one moment did Louis look upon himself as an outsider. Different, yes, but humble before achievement and honest in his need. If his thoughts brushed past theirs with the swiftness of wings, he was not consciously outstripping them. If his wit was sharp, it was not at their expense. His laughter was never at them and at last some of them learned to laugh, too. When they were over their astonishment!

Unhurried in their judgment, the students observed this strange creature methodically as if he were a new specimen under their microscope. Was he a playboy or could he really work? Here they came up against something which they never quite understood in Louis Agassiz. He could do both at the same time, or rather, he could be in a state of obvious enjoyment over something which seemed to them to call for nothing but the attitude of unremitting toil. But they discovered that, toil or play, he could spend more hours without tiring than they could, and that he managed to produce better results. A quality to which the German-Swiss willingly paid homage.

They began to wander over to his strange room at odd hours to smoke a pipe and to look with tolerant amusement at the newest addition to the room's occupants. Not until they at last suspected that this hodge-podge of birds, beasts, fish, and rocks had some significance in its confusion did they give it real attention. Then and there began the first classroom of Louis Agassiz. With the boys lounging about, ready to challenge any statement, he produced the evidence for his latest idea and clarified it for himself as he made it clear for others; one of the rewards of teaching which the pupils seldom hear about. Then wondering whether they had been to a party or a lecture, the students would go back to the laboratory to try to quiet the exciting thoughts that raced between them and the slide under the microscope. Yes, this lad could work, but in what strange ways!

Could he, they went on with the business of sizing him up, hold a place among them in sports which they took almost as seriously as work? He was well grown, and he seemed to have enormous strength, but had he skill in using it? They rated fencing very highly, the older students speaking darkly of duels. In a short time Louis taught them new tricks of fencing, and the talk about duels became more and more vague. Yet they discovered that he would never hunt with them. He refused to shoot any of these animals or birds which so excited his curiosity, but human beings did well to dodge his rapier. He could also meet any of them on or in the water, and he could walk and climb endlessly. But nobody ever caught him on a horse, or a donkey, or indeed anything but his own sturdy legs. At Kommers no matter how early or how late students might drop in, Louis was still there eating and drinking as if he had just come. Yes, this boy seemed to have considerable capacity in every direction. The students finished with their speculations about him and began to try to keep up with him.

Nor were the professors unaware of the new member of their classes. They went about their own ways of sizing him up which were not unlike those of the students and which led to much the same conclusions. Professor Schinz watched the boy awhile and then gave him the key to his private library. In the whole University here was the man to whom Louis would most naturally gravitate, the man who held the chair of Natural History. Not medicine for his specialty, but birds! And Louis for whom birds had always been a recreation and delight, turned another labor into play. Outdoors, a new area to explore for identification; indoors, a collection which Professor Schinz had made complete and had put at his service. Again the magic of Louis was at its work!

Yet what schoolman would feel that he had been charmed into foolish generosity when he saw the dark head bent hour after hour over one of the books from his shelves while Louis, with help from willing Auguste, copied page upon page until the manuscript was complete? Louis had no money, but he had something which the old naturalist prized more, a quality which did well to underlie the charm.

The two boys still tramped the highways on their way home which was now in Orbe. They had a long distance to travel and it is not unlikely that they used a form of hitch-hiking. There is no evidence that it was a thumb which stopped a fine gentleman in a fine carriage one warm day. It may have been curiosity as to what two boys of that age could find so engrossing to talk about; it may have been wonder that such proud, high-stepping boys should be so dusty and travel-worn; whatever the motive, he drew his sleek horses up beside them and offered them a lift. And at the same time presented himself with a return far out of proportion to his generosity.

For then and there, this fine gentleman from Geneva found the kind of boy whom he would have liked for his son, liked so much, indeed, that he decided then and there to look into the matter. Louis was in good form, on his way home, excited about his university life, radiant with health and good will. He felt at once the warm interest of the stranger and responded with the unselfconscious friendliness which his elders found so engaging. The man had an excellent lunch aboard and Louis was always hungry. The man was interested in what Louis did at the University, and what he intended to do when he had finished there. Louis always enjoyed talking about himself and his plans and his ideas. The two got along together admirably.

When the lunch was eaten, and the man probably had small enough share of it, while the talk still ran on unfinished, and the man had small enough share of that, the horses drew up before the parsonage and Louis sprang into his mother's arms honestly forgetful of his fine friend. But Auguste gravely did the honors and when the carriage drove off down the road it took with it a man who had made several new friends.

A few days later Pastor Agassiz called his son into the study. Rose watched his gusty entrance and then dropped her eyes to her mending. If Louis had not been so engrossed in his plans for the day he might have felt the depression heavy in the room. His father passed an open letter to him, and his mother examined the heel of a sock. Louis ran rapidly through the letter, and now his mother watched him. She remembered how he had leaped at the chance to leave for Bienne. Would that eager young spirit leap at this new chance and leave her now in a deeper, more final way? She watched his face change as he read. Then he threw the letter on the old desk and laughed at their worried faces.

"Is the man mad!" he cried. "Why should I want to be adopted by anyone? Have I not two good parents?"

The pastor sighed. "Good perhaps, but not wealthy. We cannot dismiss this offer so lightly, my son."

Nor did they dismiss it lightly. For hours they discussed it. And at the end came out where they went in. It was true that the adopted son of a rich, well-born man would have opportunities which Pastor Agassiz could never offer his brilliant son. But it was true, too, that a boy could not give up a pair of parents who loved and understood him without losing more than he gained. And it was true, wasn't it, that he never would be bettered by a training for a station which could not be his own and for which he cared nothing? "Unless of course," and Louis' dark eyes gleamed at his mother, "unless you are tired of these too painful sacrifices?" Rose laughed back at him, and the pastor folded up the paper. He still looked grave but the worried wrinkles had gone with their laughter.

It gives one pause to think what might have happened if Louis Agassiz had grasped at this offer of adoption from a man who would have given him everything which his heart most desired, education, travel even to exploration, opportunity to write, freedom from concern over money matters, all the assistance which he desired and Louis demanded a great deal, anything which would forward a brilliant young man toward a brilliant career.

Probably nothing much would have happened except perhaps a brief financial release for the boy's parents. In an incredibly short time neither Louis nor his foster-father would have had a cent or a sou. Even when Louis worked hard to gather a sum for a cherished project, he was always amazed to discover that it was spent just when he needed it most. If he had found himself with an apparently inexhaustible fund while he was still too young for definitely formulated plans, his career might have exploded into a shower of fireworks sparks. He seemed to need the stabilizing effect of poverty to teach him that a man could not give himself to every interest which life offered; that sometimes a channel had to narrow for depth. He seemed to need the struggle against poverty as an outlet for his vitality, his vigor, which might easily distract a rich man's son. Unlike Darwin, whose fragile body would have broken if the burden of support had been laid upon it, and whose rare mind could not have squandered its riches in a clerk's office and had strength left over for creative thinking, Louis needed just this challenge to his strength to keep him steady and true to his gifts. Nothing, probably, not even great riches, could have deflected his genius permanently, but the flowering of it might have been delayed.

But for Louis the matter of adoption needed no consideration whatever. The question was as simple for him as the classification of birds. A robin did not step out of its tribe to become a nightingale. Louis was born an Agassiz and he fully expected to stay an Agassiz and to beget sons who were true Agassizes. He had no notion of becoming a graft on the tree of somebody else. He went back to the business of copying the book which he needed without a thought of the easy dollar which might have bought it for him. He probably had little more thought for the man who would have given it to him so willingly, unless the mail brought a letter from him. Yet such was the effect that Louis made on that sunny morning tramping through the dust, that for as many years as the man lived his letters came regularly to the boy whom he would have liked for a son.

The two years at Zurich were over, finished so quickly that to Louis they seemed scarcely begun. The brothers cleared away their collections again, but this time sorrowfully for Auguste could go no further with Louis. They packed up the great rolls of paper on which they had copied the two volumes of Lamarck's Animaux sans Vertèbres, and congratulated each other that now Louis would be able to use their learning when he went on to Heidelberg. Auguste had already forgotten their contents, but Louis could have lost all the manuscript he copied and still known its pages. They set their animal boarders free, and gave away their collections. They thought that they had cleaned up their room into a state of perfect orderliness but it is not unlikely that their good friend, the landlady, had a different opinion. Yet she grieved to see them go, two such good-tempered, honest boys, and kissed them on both ruddy cheeks when they left her. They could not wave when they looked back because their arms were so filled with odds from which it was impossible to part.

Of the two, it may have been Auguste who felt the separation more deeply. He was ready for business with his uncle, he had no further desire for learning, but his thoughts and desires had grown for so long from his brother's needs that now his own must have seemed too shaky and newborn to furnish enough motive for action. It was time, indeed, that the younger boy had his chance!

Louis, even as he said good-bye to Zurich, had his face turned toward Heidelberg. He could not see how to get along without the brother who had been his very self, but if the future could not include Auguste, then he must learn to manage without him. Louis had a background and training which had made him profoundly religious. He had faith in God's intentions in regard to himself as well as to the rest of the world. He never lost that faith.

Curiously enough, with that immovable core, he had an exterior which had a chameleon-like tendency to take on the color and flavor of the people closest to him. When Auguste left him, so, too, did his Swiss ways of thinking, speaking, feeling. He seemed to himself quite German as he identified himself with German university life, just as later he became thoroughly American. A happy faculty for one who was to belong to so many nations!

That year and a half at Heidelberg which carried Louis over the border of his twentieth year, bore him over other borders of life into broad distances which spread out fan-like and which he never finished exploring. Bereft of Auguste, he found himself acquainted with friendship. Rich with his growing maturity, he fell in love. Small wonder he left his boyhood behind him in Zurich.

All his life Louis was to go on making friends, and often losing them because his judgment was likely to be blurred by his enthusiasm, but he never made a sounder choice than when he walked into the botany lecture room that May morning in Heidelberg. He looked about for the young German whom Professor Tiedmann had mentioned the evening before in their interview. The lad had sounded like his sort. Over in the corner sat a quiet boy with a sensitive face and clear, intent eyes. Instead of scribbling down everything which Tiedmann said, he seemed to consider the words as they flowed past him and when they suggested a new idea he wrote it down. Most of the time he listened. Louis moved over next to him.

When the lecture was over they looked at each other. "You are Alexander Braun?" And, "You are Louis Agassiz?" Then as one, "Tiedmann told me about you," and they walked out of the classroom together, not really to be separated again during their lives. They moved on into the laboratory, discussing one of the few points which Alexander had written in his notebook. As they passed down the row of heads bent over microscopes, Alex plucked one from its observations by the thick hair on the crown.

"Louis Agassiz has come," he said. "Give him greeting." And Karl Schimper walked away from his microscope with them. The triumvirate was formed!

What was it that gave such zest to study in those days? Was it because so much offered itself for discovery that even a lad might contribute something new? That young Alex and Karl could experience the excitement of finding out a law which everyone knows now, the neat uncrowded arrangement of leaves called phyllotaxis? Was it because only boys who were driven by the terrible need to know what had been known, and to contribute more in payment, only such boys would cloister their youth behind academic walls? And are we now so discovered and so exploited that study has forever lost its excitement? And instead of struggling to push back heavy stone doors, are the boys ushered too easily by doormen into luxurious academic hotels? In all the world nothing can be so exciting as the discovery of something new, some small event of life which no one has known before, some great illumination of thought by which the old takes on a new form that clarifies the problems of the race. In those student days the boys knew that excitement and worked like young gods on offerings for the greater gods. Who sometimes were greatly amazed and looked warily to their own academic fame!

The three boys wandered through the spring woods together, the two botanists exchanging all they had for the zoology which Louis had to contribute. And it was a fair exchange. Alex wrote his father that here was a naturalist who knew all the mammals, could recognize a bird as far as he could hear it, and could name every fish that swam. A boy who would teach him how to stuff fishes and with him make a collection of every native kind. And that he was very happy now because he had found someone whose occupations were the same as his own. The hours spent preparing and mounting specimens were no longer dimmed by monotony; while one worked the other read aloud, physiology, zoology, anatomy, or they worked together exchanging what Braun called scientific matters in general. Listen to them. Echoes of freshman days from every university on earth with youth settling all of life's problems. Yet from the fire of those discussions some warmth still lingers, and there is no reckoning the conflagrations which they started.

Leuckart, the zoologist, made his lectures far more interesting than did Tiedmann who was kind and often dull. The boys demanded extra lectures, and got them, though sometimes after waiting while the college clock struck seven and the five minutes after, they had to go in a hilarious body to Leuckart's house and get him out of bed. Bischoff, the botanist, went off by day with his brilliant boys, and spent extra hours with them over the microscope giving them his skill in handling it. Bronn, the paleontologist, who knew so much that the time allotted the course bade fair to finish before he was well started on it, left his precious details in despair, and turned over to the boys such a collection of fossils as made the horizon of life stretch and expand itself into new aeons. With their eager minds shooting questions at him, drawing conclusions fresh at least to them, urging him on to new ones himself, the man must have quickened into amazed appreciation of the importance of his own work. More salvage from teaching which the student yields, unaware. Neither Louis nor his master could know that over thirty years later Agassiz was to teach American students from this same collection at Harvard, and deliver over to his boys, as he had received it, some of that high excitement of his youth.

They were geared to speed, those university boys! It was town against gown in old Heidelberg then just as it is today in Cambridge, or Hanover, or Oxford. The lifetime resident against the temporary visitor whose young insolence takes over all of a citizen's privileges as well as many of his own. The town tolerates, scolds, and secretly holds its sides at its swaggering, shouting visitors. It sees them come and go, alike in the side presented to it, different only as the names come back in after years on scrolls of gold or black. To the town, Agassiz was probably only the name of another of those beer-drinking studenten, one of the three tall boys who arm in arm paraded the old streets, or sang German choruses ringing to the blackened rafters of the ancient taverns.

What the town did not know, never knows, is that this unending stream of youth has nothing transient about it. Inarticulate, but wise, the boys know it. They are, bone and marrow, a part of their university, leaving with it when they tramp away some of their strength on which it will grow. Ancient as the oldest stones on which they tramp, young as its latest device, they are the university. These boys, then, with all their forward look were part of the twelfth century when Heidelberg's foundation was laid and the town grew around it. The transient householders who came and went with no strong bond to hold them together from century to century were the town. What college lad could resist swaggering over this splendid rank!

Just as the Harvard freshmen before classes begin, explore every foot of land and sea within radius of car or bus, so Louis and his new friends set out to discover the possibilities of Heidelberg. They climbed the hills, and scrambled over castle ruins, they fried liver and bacon over an open fire, and drank jugs of beer, they astonished an old woman so with their antics that she regretted the death of her husband because of the amusement he had missed. They wrote home to their parents about it, and probably roared with laughter as they wrote. They were nineteen, and on their own for the first time, and life was not all enclosed in the pages of a book.

The pace was set in that first week for all the work and all the fun that could be crowded into a twenty-four-hour day. And it continued until Louis, never missing anything, succumbed to a typhoid fever epidemic at the college and was bundled off to Alexander Braun's home in Carlsruhe. By that time the call of medicine had become so faint that Louis had difficulty in recalling that he was supposed to become a physician. Nobody now could have deflected him from his straight course. The inflexible directing force of his genius held the rudder firm.

Louis, shaken with the weakness of typhoid, went back to the friendly house at Carlsruhe where he had spent weekends and vacations since home at Orbe was out of reach. Ill, but not too ill to realize the comfort and healing in the quiet hands and serene face of the girl who helped to nurse him. Men have ever been susceptible to the charms of the nurse who mothers and rules them into a state of childhood dependence. Louis, who had never been sick in his life, and who had never been without warmth in his heart for any girl from his mother to his least playmate, succumbed instantly to Cecile. No longer was she Alex Braun's younger sister who had been handy to have around because she could make quick and accurate sketches of specimens when Louis needed them. She was Cily whose absence left him desolate and restless, and whose return brought him the oddly combined sense of being relaxed and invigorated, which is falling in love.

No illness could devastate the charm of Louis. Cily watched over him whenever her mother would permit, she made sketches for him whenever he demanded them. The sketches drifted away from insects to surreptitious outlines of a boy's fine head with deep-set glowing eyes until at last when Louis was better, they became his first portrait and we see how he looked at nineteen to the girl who loved him. A bonny lad, even when unquickened by his laughter and his swift speech.

When it came time for Louis to travel back with Alex to his home at Orbe, he had no mind to leave his Cily unattached. With no money, his education only begun, no prospects of a home and settled future, Louis engaged himself to Cecile. And no one could reveal to her who parted from him so tenderly, so proudly, that he was never to have a real home for her or a settled future. Small difference it would probably have made if she had known!

LOUIS was to find for the first time in his life that his strong and splendid body could not respond to his merciless demands upon it. He had to recognize, with amazement but with final acceptance, that typhoid was something which you could not shake off like an annoying insect. Healing required time, and he, who begrudged time for anything but his work, must surrender it. Louis could not go back to Heidelberg.

It is a lonely and a heartburning experience for the young to have to step aside and watch others, less well equipped, march by. A year then is so long a time that there is no end to it. The unweakened spirit can scarcely endure its wait for the disabled body. Alex and Karl in those long months would surely climb beyond the reach and need of their young leader. Would that lost year ever be made up?

Louis may have felt this soreness of spirit when he first capitulated to the necessity of a year at home, but no matter how sore his spirit, it never lost its elasticity. All his life he could adjust to new and difficult situations because of this resilient quality which did not know how to recognize defeat. If he must stay in Orbe, he would make Orbe his university and extract from it the kind of degree which it offered.

It was no hardship to Louis to obey the command to stay out-of-doors. The family, so glad to have him back with them, saw little of him those days. His letters to Alex are so full of projects that they must have made university work within four walls seem a dull and musty undertaking. His experiments with tadpoles, one batch of which his family let die, as families will, gave some original contributions to Dr. Leuckart which interested him greatly. His jaunts to the mountain lakes furnished him with new fresh water fish all of which he preserved and noted carefully, the beginning of his great work about them. His explorations of the Jura Vaudois, while he thriftily visited all the pastors of the region, provided him the material for his first essay in natural history, a catalogue of all the plants of the countryside.

The year, so unwelcome, piled up riches for him: health, pleasure, knowledge. Unhurried, he could spend himself on the earth and get back from it all that he invested with such abundant interest that all his life he was tempted to no other speculation with his capital. He discovered new ways of work with new material during that year which proved as short as it promised to be long. And at the end of it he had progressed definitely in the direction toward which he was ever propelled by inner urge of his genius.

Nor had he drifted away from the two boys who must have missed the zest of the days when he drove them with his enthusiasms. They exchanged all through the year long letters of their astounding discoveries accompanied by boxes of specimens to prove them. Louis writes a little wistfully that he supposes they continue to come together evenings, and begs them to make him a sharer in their discoveries. He need not have asked. No discovery was sure and complete without his comment upon it, and if many of them had already been worked out, or discarded, they served their vitalizing purposes. The triumvirate held together and throve on them.

So that when Alex wrote Louis in the late summer that he was leaving Heidelberg for Munich, and invited him to come along, it was with no sense of joining a stranger that Louis accepted. Practical about it, Alex was, too. The lectures were free, he told Louis, lodging and board as cheap as at Heidelberg, and beer plenty and good. The best of professors in natural history – he knew that this would win Louis – and, moreover, a future when, he prophesied, they would soon be friends with all of them. The finest of libraries, trips to the Alps, and – where shall he engage lodgings? Irresistible bait! All of it. At the end of October Louis in high excitement called for Alex at Carlsruhe, greeted and left his Cily with equal facility, and strode off to conquer Munich.

November is a dreary month, and after all, four walls are four walls. Louis had left behind him in that year at Orbe a certain sort of freedom which was the breath of his life. The university routine was a time-clock to him which he resented. From seven in the morning until nine at night, lectures with now and then an evening passed with a professor when, Louis wrote his sister, they discussed with might and main subjects of which they often knew nothing. Everybody too busy during these first weeks to recognize him as he liked to be recognized. A dreary November with letters home that worried his mother with their discontent. Well as she knew him, she did not realize that his mood would pass when he could again feel himself a leader. She scolded him as any mother would reprove such an irritating son. Was he not in exactly the position that he had chosen, and now why this distaste about the study of medicine? She proceeds to tell him just what the effect on his family and friends will be if he sets aside his medical profession, and when she has finished she has brought her errant son to terms. No longer does he waver. Certainly he will be a doctor, he promises her; he had no intention of being anything else. But as for getting married as she advises, he has no mind to bear confinement so soon. (Poor Cily!) But he knows a wonderful chance to go around the world at government expense, and please talk it over with papa. The naturalist within him sat back and smiled. Deflected for a little, perhaps, by Rose Agassiz, but small chance she had against him!

Small chance had papa either, though the idea of circumnavigating the globe threw him into what would have been a frenzy if he had not been a man of God. In a deeply disturbed letter he reminded his son of his mania for rushing full gallop into the future, and informed him that he would not hear of anything except a physician's diploma for him. No more nonsense! said papa.

But the winter of Louis' discontent was over by now. He had no desire to be anywhere except exactly where he was, at the head of his own selected group in the university. And if the elder Agassizes could have looked in upon him, they would have known that their cause was lost.

Munich was home already, his crowded rooms the center of his existence. Rose Agassiz would have been aghast at their disorder. Her eyes would have been blurred by the thick tobacco smoke, her ears confounded by the rumble of voices in splendid discord over some disputed statement usually made by her son. Her son, who dominated the disorder, the noise, the confusion of men and books, even the stray professor sitting in the corner. She would have swelled with pride, pastor's wife or not, and the patient, imperturbable genius would have checked off another victory for itself. Perhaps it did, anyway, knowing that such a wise mother was bound to gather the substance of things in a mother's wise ways.

The Little Academy was more exclusive than the most restrictive secret-letter society which a university ever produced. You could not wander through old Munich's narrow streets to Sendlinger Thor No. 37, and knock at the door of that first-floor room, just because you had a pocket full of money to spend. Though those boys always had a project which needed money! Nor because you were a good fellow, or an athlete idol, or a poet, or a songster, or for any reason at all unless you were an outstanding person in your relation to science. Even if you were a professor you would not be welcome unless you had a contribution to make.

The professors kept an eye on No. 37, and some of them envied Dollinger because he had coralled this live group in his downstairs rooms, and some of them condoled with him. Just as they would today according to temperament. Professor Dollinger himself dropped in upon them at odd and welcome times with plants for Alex and advice for Louis when his mice would not breed true. Oken loved to confound them with a startling statement which agreed with nothing they had discovered, and then soothe them by telling them they must accept it on philosophical grounds. He gave them beer, and von Martius made them tea, and the zoologist, Michahelles, set up a menagerie of his own in competition with Louis and they exchanged Italian turtles for Swiss snakes.

Karl Schimper at the height of the brilliant promise of his unfulfilled youth completed the triumvirate again. Each gave his course, Louis natural history, Alex botany, and Karl on his arrival became their professor of philosophy. The Little Academy throve and in its audience sat many a speculative professor listening to these youngsters who made no secret of their intentions to become professors in very truth. The older men must have gripped their chairs tightly sometimes!

The zest of success filtered back through letters to papa. If travel was a source of anxiety at home, then no more about it. But how about this business of acquiring a professorship instead of a practice? Would his father consent, if Louis could produce just one work of distinction, to a year with natural history only and a professorship at the end of it? Louis never wavered in his confidence that the professorship would be produced. No, his father would not. Both he and the uncle congratulated the lad on his choice of evening recreation – recreation, indeed! and continued to expect him to deliver the M.D. The genius in his son folded its hands again, but was not in the least discouraged.

Now life became so crowded that Louis could not even come home for vacations. An occupation, so secret that he could only hint at it to his brother, held him at Munich too closely even for an anticipated trip to the Tyrol. But secrets have most unexpected sources of leakage.

Dr. Schinz decided to represent Munich at the meeting of the Natural History Society in Lausanne. Louis watched him go wistfully. Some time he would go back, he promised himself, and when he went, Lausanne would not greet him as a prophet from his own country, or even as it would now greet the worthy and solemn Dr. Schinz. He returned to his room to work on his secret, never thinking to warn the professor that it was a secret.

But Pastor Agassiz and his brother-in-law had taken a little summer vacation trip, and ever anxious to improve their time, they dropped in to the convention at Lausanne. The grave doctor heard their names and walked up to them. Were they by any chance related to a brilliant young student of theirs in Munich? A lad by the name of Louis Agassiz?

They were! They were, indeed!

Then might he, one of the professors, congratulate them formally, as they congratulated themselves at the university, upon the assiduity and intelligence of this distinguished member of the Agassiz family?

He might, indeed! And perhaps he could tell them when they could expect to hear that Louis was now a qualified physician?

Oh, of that he knew nothing. But he could tell them that this son and nephew was at present engaged upon a project which in the very fact that he had been chosen for it carried the implication of great honor. And that such were his diligence and accuracy that the scientific world would recognize it when his work was finished.

Yes, yes, with dazed glances at each other. And what was this great work on which Louis was engaged?

So then they learned the cherished secret. How von Martius had turned over to his student all of the magnificent collection of fishes which he and Spix had brought back from Brazil, and for which ever since the unfortunate death of his friend, von Martius had searched to find someone worthy to carry on its natural history. And how Louis had hesitated to accept the honorable offer because of his devotion to his university work, but upon their urgent demand had accepted it. And what a magnificent piece of work he had achieved with forty colored folio plates and the text all in Latin!

Papa and Uncle Mathias drove home, still dazed, with the news. Nor was the mother surprised, or Auguste either! He promptly gave Louis' latest letter to his uncle while his enthusiasm was high, and then spent the rest of the day reassuring the uncle's newborn anxiety that he had not forgotten to forward the remittance which Louis asked for. No indeed, it was already in the mail! And with it a heartening note which Auguste did not mention that the stoutest antagonists of his natural history schemes had begun to come over to his side. The genius of Louis unfolded its hands and began to stir about. And Louis wrote back, "Will it not seem strange when the largest and finest book in papa's library is one written by his Louis? Will it not be as good as to see his prescription at the apothecary's?" Though he offset the practical effect by an airy addition to the effect that the effort would bring him in but little; nothing at all, in fact. Except a few copies of the book. Louis was beginning to find out about the rewards of literature! And his discovery was no help to his cause.

But Louis was never daunted by lack of money. On the contrary the satisfaction of everybody concerned with Brazilian fishes encouraged him to go ahead with his own natural history of the fresh water fishes of Germany and Switzerland. Then when all the naturalists and foreign savants met at Heidelberg, he would have something to show them. Louis was curiously practical about forwarding his own ends through the right people and the right efforts. And if one of these ends did not happen to be a good living, a good living received very little attention.

He dedicated his book to Cuvier, and Cuvier began to notice him. He wrote to Humboldt a long and convincing appeal to accompany him on a journey to the Ural Mountains. And like the letters of application of many a young student, his request was turned down. But the letter certainly made Humboldt acquainted with the many advantages which would accrue to him and his expedition were Agassiz to accompany him! Louis believed that there was no sense in concealment of superiority, as indeed there was none. Humboldt remembered him. And Cuvier became his warm friend from the moment of the dedication.

As for Pastor Agassiz, he unfolded the magnificent book on Brazilian fishes from its wrappings and sat down to write to his gifted son:

"I hasten, my dear son, to announce the arrival of your beautiful work, which reached us on Thursday from Geneva. I have no terms to express the pleasure which it has given me. In two words, for I have only a moment to myself, I repeat my urgent entreaty that you would hasten your return as much as possible . . . The old father who waits for you with open heart and arms, sends you the most tender greeting . . ."

This, in spite of the fact that instead of the long-waited medical degree, Louis unexpectedly presented a degree of doctor of philosophy. Not a substitute for the M.D., he announced, but to give dignity to the title page of the Brazilian fishes volume, and to make a little surer – this he did not emphasize – the possibilities of a professorship. And gratifyingly enough, no oral examination required, such was the excellence of the written examinations. Louis could take his vacation at home with no sense of prodigal son.

Most famous people learn before they become famous to let others attend to the details of their work, quite probably the reason why they get time to be famous. Louis lost no time in acquiring this characteristic; indeed, he seemed to be born with it as perhaps he had to be since he was born to be famous. Before he was ten, his young sister, Cecile, was making drawings for him, and Auguste was tramping the countryside and wading the lake to collect specimens for him. Now that he was twenty, Louis had his system in full swing. Never was he to be without his retinue of helpers.

Such a policy would seem to require an unlimited amount of money since assistants are likely to place a fairly high valuation on their services. But it was never money which Louis offered the men who served him so faithfully. Money was so unimportant a thing to him that he would have considered it entirely inadequate as a return. We may well wonder in these days of price tags upon everything, including men, how help was possible without cash payment. But there are people, now and then, so rare indeed that most of the world denies their existence, people who are so filled with abundance of all we most desire from life, so enriched with gaiety of spirit, with acuteness of thought, with wit of tongue and sweetness of affection, that all we ask is a chance to stand by and serve. And we lose nothing, for life at once becomes heightened to such a pitch as only supermen live. We move among the stars, and who can pay us for that?

Louis Agassiz shared everything that he had, and if money was the least of his possessions, he could divide up only what he had and make it seem a subordinate thing compared with the stimulus of his company. When assistants found life among the stars too difficult for the ordinary human frame, Louis regretfully let them go back where they belonged. And he was, by and large, in hot water most of his life because of this system which took into no account the demands of the ordinary human frame!

Yet here was Dinkel, who began to draw his fishes for him almost as soon as he arrived at Munich, and who kept on drawing fishes or anything else which Louis filled with glamour and offered to him until sixteen years had worn him down to the necessity of separation. And as many more years were filled with unhappiness away from Agassiz. Only one day in the country where Louis had brought the young artist to see and draw a bright trout served to attach the lad, but years of hardship were needed to make him waver. He had a standing desk for his drawing in the crowded Munich lodging where no one could sit down, and there he listened and grew used to the clamor which was sometimes a wrestling of hard bodies among boys whom he knew only as Rhubarb, Molluscus, Cyprinus, and sometimes a wrestling of flexible minds which left him sure only of an outcome of more work for him. Dinkel helped to decorate the white walls with caricatures of his betters and skeletons of those not so good. He admired the Little Academy and made an offering to it of his magic pencil.

So essential did his drawings become to Louis that later when college was over, the Agassiz family was set into a flutter by a letter requesting arrangements for both boys at the parsonage. The father begged Louis to tell him where in Heaven's name he could stow an artist when every available inch was occupied in the preparations for Cecile's wedding. Louis regretted that they were so crowded, but there was no getting on without Dinkel. And Dinkel with the observant eye soon had his unassuming place in the parsonage. He and Cily Braun, when Louis could reach her, settled down to draw with grace and accuracy the interminable, inexhaustible supply of specimens which piled up around them.

But the three years at Munich had taught Dinkel to take things as they came, and the new parsonage at Concise proved indeed much better than most things which had been coming his way in college. Nowadays we hear a good deal of discussion about whether growing boys should work their way through college, considerate adults holding that the strain of additional work with possible lack of proper nourishment is too high a price to pay for advanced education. Possibly it is, the kind they get. But there seemed no visible strain in any of the boys who shared Munich's gay poverty.

Louis had two hundred and fifty dollars a year and Alex had about three hundred. The other boys had none, but as Louis sagely remarked, they had less than he did so they got along very well together. Balanced-diet protagonists would object to their fare of bread and cheese with home-brewed Munich beer and a pipe of tobacco. Any sensible person would pronounce it useless for six hearty lads to try to get along on less than six hundred a year from which tuition, books, and clothes had to come. But six boys did get along, admirably if scantily.

Days of plain living, begun at five-thirty with coffee served from the machine which was needed later for soaking skeletons, and later still for evening tea. Louis, the housekeeper, could not clutter up his room with unnecessary utensils. At six, mathematics, proof if nothing else were needed of vitality! At eight, clinical lectures; at ten, mechanics of physics followed by natural history of amphibians as the day warmed up. For a while they were concerned because they had nothing to do between twelve and one, but they corrected this omission with lectures on the sense organs. At one, a good and well-served meal at a private house which they discovered after many trials, a meal which cost about nine cents each. It seems doubtful if the boardinghouse made much money on its boarders that year. Then chemistry, entomology, natural philosophy, and finally the high point of the day, Schelling's lectures on the philosophy of revelation which lasted from four to six. Six o'clock to six o'clock, a giant's day! But now that the university lectures were over, the boys went home and produced a few of their own, the fruit of the Little Academy. So, as Alex wrote his father, you see there was enough to do!

And as Yankees say, enough, to do with. Louis from a little extra money made by writing bought himself a microscope. When Karl Schimper, quite penniless, first decided to join the group, Louis scraped together enough money to get him there; and when he arrived bringing along his brother William, Louis, far from being disconcerted, gave him the key to his money chest into which Karl was to dip during his three years at Munich. A second artist helped Dinkel, and there were the six husky lads, the nucleus of a group which brought the professors into the position of hangers-on. As far as one is able to judge, their health was quite adequate to the strain.

But Munich days were nearly over. For the last time Louis would pack up his college books and weed out his cherished collections. The boys hung around the emptied rooms together, inarticulate and gruff. They drank to the future together at their favorite beer-hof. They said good-bye to professors who would never let them know how empty the classrooms would feel, or how proud they were of these shining results of Munich's early efforts. They wrenched themselves away at last. And Munich's old streets filled up with a new crowd of shouting students, reckless of citizens, strong and eager with their immolation for the college.

Louis stood ready to go, his books and collections sent off to the shelves provided for them at his uncle's, most of his clothes on his back, and in his bag his passport to home and family, his degree of Doctor of Medicine. Nor had it been handed out to him as easily as the Doctor of Philosophy. Louis had used the store of his mighty energy well to the limits of its resources in fulfilling his promise. "My character and conduct are a pledge of its accomplishment," he had told his brother, and added that he hoped it would please Mama. He passed through the ordeal when after nine days of examination, the Faculty sent him out of the room to wait their decision. That wait alone in a gloomy hall with the long table of learned men behind the closed door while an excited fatigued brain records with dreadful clarity mistakes which it now could correct! The numb beatification when the door opened and he saw Dollinger smile at him. The far-off sound of the Dean's voice, "The Faculty have been very much pleased with your answers; they congratulate themselves. . . ." The drunken stagger out into the sunshine where the boys waited; and the cheer of their celebration. Louis had his degree!

His mother's letter was reward enough. "Only one thing was wanting," she told him, "to make me the happiest of mothers, and this, my Louis, you have just given me." And only one regret, that her beloved father had not lived to share her happiness. Remembering her tenderness and delight in his achievement, Louis patted his sheepskin and resolved to be as fine a doctor as the good grandfather Mayor. But as well have resolved to become a skillful shoemaker because years ago he had made excellent doll's shoes for Olympe! His genius, well-nourished and active now, cared no more for Rose Agassiz and her beautiful diploma than for Olympe and the neat small shoes.

Louis Agassiz at twenty-three besides his two degrees, had a reputation among naturalists which had nothing to do with a profitable medical practice. He had published in Latin his book on Brazilian fishes. He had caught the attention of savants with his Fossil Fishes volume which was well under way and which had at its service the collections of every well-known museum. He was no longer "a lad of great promise," he was a distinguished naturalist whose opinion was sought and respected. And he had found the taste of his achievement very sweet. Munich had stamped him with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and a naturalist's equipment. Louis respected the degree and dearly wished to fulfil his mother's intentions about it. But Rose Agassiz, when she bore him, had invested him with a legacy which defeated her own ends. And which finally made them of so little consequence to her that she quite forgot them.

PART II

STEEP SLOPES

WHEN a man has a medical degree, the next logical step is to find some patients on whom to try it out. At best the process of acquiring a practice is a struggle which demands everything that a young doctor has, all of his thought, his patience, his endurance, his time. Young Dr. Agassiz was using his thought for his fossil fishes, his patience, what there was of it, on his family, his endurance to keep his artist Dinkel and himself uninterrupted, and his time for his laboratory. Small chance a patient had!

Probably because his genius had a way of arranging his life without consulting anybody, including Louis himself, the selection for the doctor's office was a room in the home parsonage at Concise. What more natural than to settle in the only locality where Louis had really known doctors who practised and who had built up an Agassiz tradition of doctors? What more simple than to settle down at home where the question of room and board would not interfere with work? If a patient or two interrupted, that was small price to pay for the peace of the pleasant corner of the parsonage with its sunny windows where he and Dinkel could work, protected by the watchful care of Rose Agassiz who never allowed anybody, unless he looked ill, to enter.

The work on the fossil fishes progressed, the patients dropped away, alive or dead, and Louis grew more and more restless. He had raced through Munich in high gear, plunging from lecture, to laboratory, to hot discussion, to small discoveries of almost unbearable excitement. Close behind him, following his every lead, had surged other high-geared minds. The swifter the pace, the higher the spirits. The greater the recognition of his achievements, the more he could achieve. The joys and sorrows and ideas of Louis Agassiz were never meant to go unshared!

It came to pass, then, that the days at Concise grew very long with only the taciturn Dinkel to agree with him and to follow his directions. The old days of village leadership were over. These villagers stared with astonishment at two German students who marched about their town with little black caps perched on their heads. When Louis, eager for some audience, some discussion, invited them to the parsonage, they came now and then and listened good-naturedly, sleepily, without comment. Unless it came when they yawned their way home down the narrow mountain roads.

On Sundays with even work ruled out, Louis and Dinkel rowed themselves about the Lake of Neuchâtel, and in desperate ennui smashed the prehistoric pottery in its clear depths. Not vandals any more than most boys, but consumed with undirected energy. An energy that would soon fling them well out of Concise!

"We must go to Paris," Louis bent his dark brows on Dinkel, and Dinkel laid his pencil down and said, "Yes." His drawings were not finished so that of course he would go to Paris if Louis must go.

But of money there was none, and this time really none. The parsonage could give shelter, and advice, nothing else. The boys were tired of both. The publishers were willing when urged to provide only a small amount to carry on a work which gave no assurance of repayment. Even the sanguine spirit of Louis began to wonder if it