Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[93] ever seeing them fight. Like many small men he had a marked appreciation for large size, whether in trees or men, loving to measure the one or chat with the other.

For some years before the Civil War, when rowing was coming into vogue and wherries were built, he used to row on Charles River, and he describes his enjoyment of this in an early paper of the “Autocrat.” He told me that he gave this up during the war because of perpetual solicitude about his son and other favorite young men who were at the front; he said that he could not bear to be beyond call. He thus took his part in the marked rise of interest in physical training which occurred about that time, although his then puny look led many people to regard such tastes as being somewhat amateurish in him. He suffered greatly during his whole career from asthma, which many people outgrow with years, though he did not. When I lived in Newport he once came there to spend a week at the house of the late Mrs. John Jacob Astor--who was perhaps the last of the New York millionnaires to exhibit a positive