William Blaikie.

When I attempted to connect myself with Harvard College, writes Julian Hawthorne in Harper's Magazine, there was one person appertaining to it of whom I often thought with awe and reverent curiosity. The fame of him preceded by several months my actual introduction to him, so that my imagination had time to picture him in all manner of portentous guises. The gentleman to whom I refer was an undergraduate, and at that period a sophomore. He was commonly spoken of as "Bill Blaikie," and his claim to my reverence lay in the fact that he was the typical strong man of the college. I doubt whether I should have had the perseverance to wriggle my way through the examinations for admission had I not been constantly stimulated by the reflection that Bill Blaikie was (to my mind) the central fact of the university.

My boyish studies had made me familiar with King Arthur and his Round Table, and in general with all the knights and giants of medieval romance; and I therefore had plenty of heroic types at command by which to prefigure this college Titan. But a week or more of my freshman existence passed by without my seeing him, though by no means without my asking and hearing about him. Then one sunny morning there was a knock at my door, and in walked a broad shouldered, brown-bearded personage, with a burly gait, a deep, bluff voice, and a strong, good-humored countenance. My prophetic soul divined him before he announced his name-it was blaikie himself. My eyes perused him anxiously from top to toe, and my heart was satisfied. Even as he was, and not otherwise, would I have wished him to be. He was not a disappointment, and during the many years of our friendship since that day I have never known him to fall to come up to expectation.

His visit on that occasion was, I believe, to procure my subscription to the boat club; and I need not say that had Blake asked it of me, I would gladly have subscribed half my allowance. That boat club was the more or less direct occasion of our association together during our college residence; and though, perhaps, it helped to cost me my sheepskin, I am not yet regenerated from my impression that I made, upon the whole, the wiser choice. I speak, of course, for myself alone; and as Blake got his degree, the boat club had probably less to do with my catastrophe than I flattered myself with imagining. In my evenings it was my delight to go down to the gymnasium and see Blake put up the dumb-bell, and to listen to his discourses upon matters of muscular interest. Somehow or other he always seemed to know more about these things than any of us; and he was inspired by a strenuous missionary spirit, persuasive enough almost to make an oarsman out of a humpback, or a sprint-runner out of a cripple.