THOREAU, who used to love to walk its dunes and beaches, called Cape Cod "the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts." When he was alive, this arm was a peninsula, an arm curving sixty-five miles out into the Atlantic with Provincetown like a clenched fist at its extremity. But as a result of some land surgery the Cape Cod Canal was cut across the arm, and now Cape Cod is really an island with a pair of bridges spanning the rushing water of the Canal to connect it with the rest of the Commonwealth.

The clenched fingers at the tip are Provincetown, whose character no tourism can dim. It was here, on November 11, 1620, that the Mayflower dropped anchor in one of the finest natural harbors on this continent; and it was here that the Pilgrim Fathers first landed on American soil. They stayed here for five weeks, then they moved up the coast to Plymouth; and to the authentic Cape Codder, the fact that they refused to remain longer on its bleak flats means nothing at all. They came here first, and when he is asked about Plymouth Rock his reply is brief and contemptuous. "Plymouth Rock," he says, "is the name of a chicken!"

Provincetown on the Cape has had its great days. It was from here, and from Truro, six miles to the east, that the deepwater whaling men set out. And it was here that the Cape's great fishing industry was born and flourished in the mid-1800s. So important did the Provincetown fishermen become that a Western reporter was assigned to write the story of this strange community where the Fish was King.

"Fish," wrote the reporter, "is bartered at the grocery stores, shoe shops and bread stores for all commodities of life. The main business street is paved with rock cod. The women use the hind fin of the great halibut for brooms. Awnings shading the store fronts are made from the skin of the sportive porpoise. The bellrope in the church is made of eels, cunningly knotted by an old sailor. Provincetown ladies trim their hats with the red gills of the mackerel, and dog-fish lie around the shore at low tide and bark and howl in a frightful manner." A Western view of the Cape.

Leaving Provincetown, as you drive up the outer curve of Cape Cod, heading north, you see the great sweep of an exposed coast which stands out to sea like no other stretch of our continental shelf. The Cape at this point is a high cliff about three or four miles wide, and at its foot is a great beach on which the Atlantic thunders, a beach running north and south unbroken, mile upon mile, solitary, unsullied, remote. Truro, Wellfleet, Orleans, the wild, wind-swept island Monomoy, Eastham, the Nauset beach and marsh --- this is the unspoiled shore which will compose the Cape Cod seashore park if the contemplated plans are carried out.

An elemental place; on the one side the Atlantic, the breakers foaming and pounding in as far as the eye can reach, then the wall of dunes, and behind them the tidal creeks and inlets. The barricade of sand narrows to a few hundred yards at Eastham, and at high winter tides the ocean breaks through to create narrow temporary inlets to the Nauset Marsh.

The natives who live near this outermost beach have a fierce protective pride and a characteristic way of talking. Their fishing villages having English names but the pronunciation is pure Cape Cod. These people live in East-ham; or Ware-ham, or Chat-ham; they would never think of saying "Chatham" as an Englishman does.

The old story goes that one dark night two ships off Eastham came within hailing distance. The lookout on the little craft who first saw the riding-lights of the towering clipper shouted: "Ship, ahoy! Who be you?"

And the answer came back over the water: "The Flying Mercury. Out of Shanghai. Bound for Boston. Out eighty-eight days. What ship are you?"

And the reply came back: "Schooner, Mary B. Out of Eastham. Bound for Chat-ham. Out all night!"

A real Cape Codder never refers to a "thunderstorm": he calls it a "tem-pest." He has reason to know that the great gales roaring out of the north and east can do strange and terrible things. In the old days before there were lighthouses on Cape Cod some of the natives were known as "mooncussers" --- men who made their living from the salvage of wrecked ships ---"mooncussers" being those who cussed the moon, for if there was moonlight, the lookout could see the line of breakers, the shoals and the shore. The "mooncussers" were gifted with an extra sense that enabled them to smell a wreck as they lay abed, listening to the wind howl down the Wellfleet valley and across the plains of Nauset. As the storm rose they would put on their boots and make for the beach.

There they would divide into groups, one tramping the beach in one direction and one in the other. They would hold up a shingle to protect the eyes from the flying sand, and under the shingle they would strain to pierce the darkness for a rocket from a ship in distress. Whatever was washed ashore from the wreck became their instant property. During the days of the sailing ships this business of wrecking was profitable, and Emerson tells us there was considerable opposition in the town of Eastham before the people voted to erect a lighthouse on that beach. These are some of the details I imbibed from Mooncussers of Cape Cod, a quaint and quite fascinating book by Henry C. Kittredge.

The wrecks are fewer today, the ships stay farther off shore, and there aren't nearly so many in the coastal trade. But the Eastham beach in winter is still an exposed and lonely spot where a man can live in dramatic solitude watching the ocean's changing mood from hour to hour. And that is what one American writer named Henry Beston elected to do. Henry Beston had served as an ambulance driver in France and then aboard submarines in the First World War. On his demobilization, he wrote for the Atlantic and worked for a time as an associate editor on our staff. But he pulled out before I joined in 1924 and what pulled him was the magnetism of the Cape: he wanted to live the year round by himself on Nauset Beach.

At Eastham on this outermost beach he built the outermost house, a small box just big enough for one man. It measured sixteen feet by twenty, and he built it on top of one of the biggest sand dunes. He called his house the Fo'castle, and it had a tiny bedroom and a kitchen-living-room with a brick fireplace and an oil stove. To get his drinking water he sank a well pipe into the dune. Though the sea and the beach were alongside there was fresh sweet water there under the salty sand. On bitter cold days he would simply pump his few pails full, stand them in the sink, and then drain the pump immediately so that it wouldn't freeze. He tells us that he had one oil lamp and candles to read by at night, and for his fireplace he had all the driftwood he could use. To buy milk and eggs and butter meant a long walk down the beach. Rarely in calm weather he'd coax a neighbor to bring in supplies with a horse and cart.

His house was twenty feet above the high-water mark, and only thirty feet away from the great limitless beach and the ever-pounding surf. His nearest neighbors were the Coast Guards at Nauset two miles away. Beston kept a chronicle of what he saw and what he best remembered, and this as he fitted it together became a book such as Thoreau would have admired. Its title is The Outermost House and for those who love the sea in calm and angry temper this is a book to stir the mind. Here is how Mr. Beston's day began:

From the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to do, something to observe, something to record, something to study, something to put aside in a corner of the mind. There was the ocean in all weathers and at all times, now grey and lonely and veiled in winter rain, now sun-bright, coldly green, and marbled with dissolving foam; there was the marsh with its great congresses, its little companies, its wandering groups, and little family gatherings of winter birds; there was the glory of the winter sky rolling out of the ocean over and across the dunes, constellation by constellation, lonely star by star.

In his world the sea birds became his companions. He got to know the sandpipers and the yellowlegs; the talkative seagulls and the little bobwhites. He never tired watching what he calls a "raft" of coots, a whole congregation of birds sitting in the ocean just seaward of the surf with the raft rising and falling unconcernedly as the swells swept under it.

"In Thoreau's time," says Mr. Beston, "these rafts of coots formed a flock which was practically continuous the whole length of the outer Cape." In short a raft of birds miles long. And of course he kept track of the ducks, the blue-billed widgeons, the dipper ducks, the king eiders, and those other visitors from the Arctic, the auks. He noticed how many of these birds fell victim to the crude oil which was dumped into the water by the tankers. He noticed that as soon as the bird swam into that gummy mass it was as good as dead.

Mr. Beston's little house, "being low and strongly built, stood solid as a rock, but its walls thrummed in the winter gales, and the dune beneath the house trembled incessantly with the onslaught of the surf."

"Wonder what my friends at Nauset Station are worrying about," he would think to himself on a furious, pouring night, and sometimes he would go down to the beach to join one of the Coast Guards on his patrol. So it was that on a Monday morning in March shortly after o'clock, he saw "the big three-masted schooner Montclair stranded at Orleans and going to pieces in an hour. It had been blowing hard all that weekend and the Montclair bound from Halifax to New York with her rigging iced up and her crew dog-weary became helpless and unmanageable. She swung inshore, struck far out and then began to break up. Her foremast and her mainmast worked free, and scissoring grotesquely back and forth across each other they 'levered the ship open,' as one of the Coast Guards said. The vessel burst, the cargo poured into the seas from the broken belly of the hold and the crew of seven men clung to the rocking, drifting mass that was once the stern.

"One great sea drowned five of them. Men on the beach saw it coming and shouted. The men on the deckhouse shouted back and were heard, and then the wave broke hiding the tragic scene in a sluice of foam and wreckage. When this had poured away, the men on the afterhouse were gone. A head was visible for a minute, and then a second drifting southward, and then there was nothing but the sea.

"Two men still clung to the stern rail, one a seventeen-year-old boy, the other a stocky, husky-built sailor. The wave tore the boy from the rail, but the stocky man reached out, caught him and held on . . . Somehow those two hung on and at last were rescued. The whole primitive tragedy was over in a moment of time.

"As the vessel was breaking up, men came to the beach and helped themselves to the cargo and what wreckage they fancied. Later that day there was a kind of auction of the salvaged material." (The "mooncussers" were still going about their business.)

"Some have asked me," he wrote, "what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active today as they have ever been, and that tomorrow's morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now."

Editing is the most companionable form of education, and the next friend who added to my understanding of the Cape was a Boston physician. Dr. Wyman Richardson was a big man with a directness and a simplicity most endearing. He stood six feet one-and-a-half and in his prime weighed upwards of 220 pounds, but his bigness was not boisterous; he had a light touch with the fly rod, was soft-spoken, and could watch birds as silently as any. I marked him first, years ago, at the luncheon table at the Harvard Club, where his long back elevated him above the other doctors from the Medical School. Later our kindred interest in the striped bass led us to compare notes at the Tavern Club. Then in the spring of 1947 he admitted shyly that he had been doing some writing about the Cape and would I like to see it. This was the first of a dozen essays we were to publish in the Atlantic --- essays which are the quintessence of Cape Cod: the winds and the stars, the moods of the sea, the pounding beauty of Nauset Beach by night or dawn, the sound and smell of the fish feeding in the marsh, the land birds and the shore birds of which he had such expert knowledge. These were his heart's desire which he dreamed of in the winter and reveled in during the summer and autumn when, away from his practice, he entered his native element at the Farm House.

The Farm House is a rudimentary shingled cottage at Eastham which looks as if it had grown up out of the earth. The walls of the living room are covered with murals of the Canada goose by Wyman's uncle, the late Frank W. Benson, and in one or two spots the paint has cracked and flaked, but the great birds are still marvelously in motion, and one of them seems to have been shot in the neck --- as indeed it was by a younger Richardson, who, home and warm after an icy day in the marsh, had taken aim with the remark, "Want to see me hit that old gander?" not realizing that his shotgun was still loaded. The shot luckily missed the elders who were mounting the stairs on the way to bed, but it must have raised an enormous commotion in that snug room, and the spot was left bare thereafter as a warning to other casuals.

Opening off the living room with its kerosene lamps, the arrowheads, the reels, and the gun-rack, the fireplace with its deep bed of ash and on the mantle the little square clock which only Wy could make go, was the kitchen with its coal stove on which Wyman and Charlotte, his wife, prepared dishes which still make my mouth water. Wy was an exquisite cook, and I can see him stooping so as not to decapitate himself on the old oak beam as he entered the door to serve us. With our martinis we might have whitebait fried in deep fat, crispy and so flaky hot that it would burn your tongue, or crabmeat served in quahog shells. The striper chowder was a meal in itself, made from the big majestic head with just the proper accompaniment of onions, potatoes, and butter. Pilot crackers went with it of course. The striper itself Wyman might boil and serve with an egg sauce, new potatoes in their skins, and fresh peas; or you might have it cold for supper with mayonnaise in a salad. Either way, you ate to immobility.

When the tide had flooded in the marsh and was at the turn we would set forth in the long white canoe; Wy paddling stern, big as a Viking with his binoculars hanging on his great torso, one of his sons in the bow, and the guests --- young Ted and I --- in the thwarts, facing stern and armed with fly rods. We trolled a white feathered fly with a red head; Wy, who knew the pools and the holding grounds where the school stripers would be feeding, maneuvered the boat so as to swing the streamers into the window of the fish and when a three-pounder struck you could hear the reel scream. Paddling home at sunset, he would pause to spot for us the terns, the plover and the different gulls. The canoe would be lifted out and stowed in the boathouse. We would wash the salt water off the gear --- then a nightcap before the embers until yawns sent us upstairs to seek the trundle bed under the eaves. Happiness is a quiet thing.

Wyman Richardson did not begin to write until he had had an intimation that his enjoyment of this blessed place might be limited. He had done the work of five men on the home front during the war, and the arthritis which began to afflict him after V. J. Day was a warning that he would have to watch himself. It made him sleepless at first; and in the black hours, he began writing in his mind descriptions and recollections of this Nauset life he loved. When day came he put them down longhand on paper.

He wrote in two ways: mystery stories about the Cape which he hoped would be popular and which were, alas, as stiff as cardboard; and when the spirit moved him he wrote essays that are as natural and comfortable as an old shoe. What he did, what he saw, what he felt, he has preserved for us simply, with a vivid sense of participation, in his book The House on Nauset Marsh, an account of his golden days, which will be lived vicariously by those who read of them. Wyman's writing celebrates the beauty of the casual, the serene and the observant. To savor this, one has only to look at the table of contents: "Time Sense," "Blue Crabbing," "Do-Nothing Day," "Eelgrass and Depressions," "Beach and Sea," "Around the Horn," "Tide," "The March Doldrums," "Bird Flight," "Bird Language"---the very titles suggest the range and sensitivity of a wise and devoted man. If I had to pick one to indicate the flavor of his writing, I should choose Chapter 9, "Do-Nothing Day," and for these particulars:

It is September. A before-breakfast weather observation has revealed a sparklingly clear day. A deep blue sky already is beginning to be spotted with fluffy white cumulus clouds, carried before a fresh northwest breeze. Just the day for energy and activity, you say? No! It soon becomes apparent that this is a do-nothing day

Then comes a period of sitting on the edge of the low platform on the south side of the house, with bird glasses near at hand. A gray marsh hawk, looking almost blue in the bright light, follows his customary beat between the hills and down across the little meadow by the Salt Pond Creek. He sails along close to the grass with very little effort, and sometimes hangs almost motionless on an updraft as he scans the grass for sign of mouse or other succulent morsel. Suddenly, over toward the Cedar Bank, the crows begin a great racket. From all directions more crows can be seen, flying fast and true to the scene of the disturbance. Shortly, the cause of all this commotion becomes thoroughly annoyed. A very large red fox, pursued by fifty chattering crows, comes out of the cedars, lopes down through the hollow and up back of the barn, and disappears through Mrs. Doane's orchard. Undoubtedly, he will cross the road and make for the thicket the other side of Robbins' Pond.

Now butterflies claim our attention. The stunning black swallowtail comes floating gracefully by and obligingly lights on the short grass not far away. She seems not a bit skittish and will allow a quiet approach to within a few feet, as she spreads her lovely iridescent wings to catch the warmth of the sun and to show off the brilliant coral spot in her lower wing. Her mate is never very far away. He is perhaps not so beautiful as his colorful spouse, but he carries a fine yellow band near the margin of his wings that contrasts sharply with his otherwise dark coloring. He is a great fighter, too, as any black swallowtail who makes the mistake of wandering too close will soon find out. We see occasionally the tiger swallowtail, and the powerful monarch is not uncommon, but the black swallowtail belongs particularly to the Farm House . . .

We take to watching the antics of a very large orange and black wasp with a long, narrow waist --- one of the sphecid wasps. We have previously noted a slanting, half-inch hole in front of which the sand is piled up in a little mound. This wasp has succeeded in killing (or drugging?) one of those big flying grasshoppers which are so common down here, and is obviously trying to drag the monster, which is twice her length and three times her weight, to the hole. The distance is six feet, and what to the wasp must seem like a jungle of grass and weeds separates her from the hole. Her method is to grasp the grasshopper near his head with her front legs, and back up towards her destination. Unfortunately, this largely deprives her of the use of her best eyes, her delicate antennae, and she frequently goes astray. Then she lets go her prey and makes a reconnaissance, after which she hurries back. In fact, the most striking thing about her is her panic of haste.

Nothing else can be done until we have seen the feat accomplished. After a long time, the hole is reached and the wasp backs down, dragging the grasshopper after her. For a while nothing happens. Then the wasp comes out minus the grasshopper. How she managed to by-pass him in the tunnel remains a mystery. Feverishly, she starts plugging up the hole, using the mound in front, until it is completely plugged. Then she circles around a few times, comes back once and again to tamp down the plug, and finally flies away --where, we do not know. I suppose she has laid her eggs in the tunnel, and having supplied her future offspring with food, has gone off with the feeling that she has accomplished her mission.

The day ends with Wyman and Charlotte preparing the big meal of broiled striped bass and creamed potatoes, with Orleans cookies and coffee to top it off, a plain and bountiful delight.

Wyman died before his eloquent, observant book appeared, but not before he had heard from Atlantic readers who rejoiced in it a piece at a time. I only wish that in his shy way he might have known how many thousands of Americans have found, and would continue to find, pleasure in his heritage.

ON THE wall of my workroom among my prized photographs is one of a man in white ducks and white shirt sitting on the top of a paddock fence grinning down at a fat mare grazing placidly below him. The man is Dr. Hans Zinsser, the bacteriologist, and the mare was the healthy container of the typhus serum which he had devised as an antidote to typhus; the picture was taken by Hans's and my friend Charles P. Curtis, and because the photograph was snapped in the spring sunlight when the fruit trees of Dover were in bloom, one can almost catch the glint of Hans's blue eyes and the color of his crisp, sandy hair.

The country place in Dover, Massachusetts, the mare from which he could drain off the serum needed to combat the plague in Rumania, or Mexico, or China, the hunters which he also stabled here for his rides with the Groton Hunt were the rewards of thirty years' campaigning against infectious diseases. He carried the fight to the vulnerable fronts in the First World War, and thereafter to those points of outbreak where his foreign students were most in need of his aid. The finest portrayal of Hans's spirit was written by his good friend, Dr. John F. Enders, when he said: "Always loving and even often seeking out a struggle where benevolent causes were at stake, this lifelong conflict with the agents of syphilis, tuberculosis, typhus, and the rest---which he regarded perhaps only half humorously as sentient malignities---satisfied in large part his need for dangerous experience in the pursuit of generous ends. Those who surrounded him were set alight and newly energized by this flaming idealism." In his exposure he had contracted typhus fever and it was characteristic of Hans that in his greatest book he employed the incident as an opening for his tribute to the nursing profession and in particular the nurse who prevented him from jumping out a fourth-story window.

He could never take himself too seriously; what he did he did with a smile. Across the front of his barn in Dover in letters a foot high were the words:

(Since Hans refused to have his foreign quotations translated in his own books, I shall respect his wishes here.)

The grandson of one of the German revolutionaries of 1849, Hans was a cultivated blend of the liberal European tradition and the audacious American spirit. He had within him the resources of four men, and it was part of his greatness that he kept all four actively employed throughout his life.

Poetry was an early love, and he published his first volume of verse while still an undergraduate at Columbia. He wrote in the traditional forms, taking infinite pains in revision; he knew precisely what he wanted to say and if he had trouble it was in making his lines scan. When in doubt he let the sense override the meter. The German romanticist and the rebel in him both showed themselves in his poetry which we published, incidentally, not under his own signature, but under the initials "R.S." These two poems are, I think, characteristic of his best:

Hans was grounded in the classics, and since his family made annual sojourns on the Continent he came to speak French and German fluently. With this background and his love for poetry it would have been quite natural had he devoted himself to letters. But while still an undergraduate he saw service in the Spanish-American War, in the cavalry, and was shocked at the "unbelievable, miserable sanitary condition of the camps." Hans was a quick man to spark, and when his indignation was aroused it was not easily dampened. It was at this time, and I believe at the urging of his father, that his thoughts turned to medicine, and the relatively new field of immunology.

"I had luck with me," he once told me, "when I began studying the infections of the blood. It was like stepping into a new hotel on the coast: I could have any room for the asking and they all looked out to sea." But leaving the figure of speech aside, it was the laboratory which attracted him, and wherever he worked, whether at Columbia or Leland Stanford or Harvard, the pure flame of his research and enthusiasm, and the banter with which he tended it, fired those who were working close to him. Hans's dedication has been well described by Dr. Enders: "For more than three decades, and until the very last, he was in the laboratory every day and frequently at night. And he was there because he could not stay away. The problem of the moment absorbed him completely. It broke his sleep and dragged him willy-nilly to his experimental animals and his cultures. Its progress, as he has said, largely governed his mood, which was either ‘himmelhoch jauchzend' or ‘zum Tode betrübt,' depending on the success or failure of his experiments." From these experiments came one hundred and six scientific papers recording the research, many of them I suspect published at his own expense. From them too came conversation so pungent and of such breadth that those who formed the habit of lunching with him in the laboratory were never to forget his talk.

Then there was his love for music. He played the violin and the piano with considerable skill, and they were as necessary as his versification. Dr. Harvey Cushing used to tell the story of a visit he paid to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the old building on 49th Street, in search of Zinsser. It was after 5 on a wintry afternoon and the visitor was told by those who were homeward bound that he would find Dr. Zinsser two flights up and at the end of the corridor. As he approached Gushing thought he heard the sounds of music, and there was no doubt about it as he opened the door. Before him were two men in their stained lab coats: the Professor of Bacteriology playing intently on his violin, and his laboratory assistant playing just as intently on his flute. Cushing was motioned to a seat until the piece was finished.

With this went his passion for horses and for riding (which was why he was in the cavalry). Barbara Danielson, who was Master of the Groton Hunt when Hans was a member, has told me that "he loved the excitement of it, loved a headstrong horse, and he rode well. No flinging at walls, etc. but he loved flying over them. When he was coming down with typhus he spent the night at the Club and had a chill. The next A.M. he rode. I can't remember if he finished or drew out but he went home and had a temperature of about 105°.

He took the tenderest care of that fat mare which was the reservoir for his serum. To keep her company he had procured, 1 don't know where, an ex-circus horse who was pure white and who would lie down and roll over at command. To the hayloft he had brought one of the laboratory monkeys who happily adapted himself to the life in Dover. The monkey liked to tease the circus horse and would lie in wait in the loft until the broad white back was beneath him. Then he would drop down and go for a jog around the paddock. The mare lived on clover and unlike Hans she did not come down with typhus fever. In the last months of his life when he was no longer able to ride, he had his saddle brought up to his bedroom so that the smell of the leather could send his thoughts afield.

It was very good luck for me when we moved into an old house on Beacon Hill, one which was directly across the street from the Zinsser residence. This brought us into almost daily contact at a time when my fortunes were rising at the Atlantic and when I definitely needed the advice of an older man. Hans's library with bookshelves up to the ceiling and mounds of books stacked on the floor was in the front of the house. He did most of his writing at night and when his light was on I might saunter across for a beer break at 10, and if he didn't want to be interrupted he would throw me out. On Sunday evenings my wife and I would often be invited over for supper and sometimes we would bring with us the tasty leftovers from our icebox to add to the buffet, as there was never any telling how many might turn up. The Bernard DeVotos would come in from Cambridge, Charlie and Frances Curtis down from Joy Street, and likely as not ex-Chancellor Bruening or Lawrence Henderson, and former students from India or China or Paris, with the talk ranging from T. S. Eliot to Pareto, to Hitler and the Black Death.

Hans and I had been drawn closer by the editing of his book, Rats, Lice and History. He had accepted my habit of close scrutiny, indeed he had written to Ellery, although I did not know it at the time: "Ted Weeks is perhaps the most skillful pruner I have ever known. I think he could get a larger yield of apple jack from a barrel of hard cider than anybody I know." As for myself, I was enormously taken with the independent thinking, the history, and the racy skepticism which he brought to this book.

Hans says in his Preface that Rats, Lice and History was written in protest against "the American attitude which tends to insist that a specialist should have no interests beyond his chosen field --- unless it be golf, fishing, or contract bridge. A specialist --- in our national view --- should stick to his job like 'a louse to a pig's back.' We risk --- because of this performance --- being thought less of as a bacteriologist. It is worth the risk. . . We hold that one type of intelligent occupation should, in all but exceptional cases, increase the capacity for comprehension in general; that it is an error to segregate the minds of men into rigid guild classifications; and that art and sciences have much in common and both may profit by mutual appraisal. The Europeans have long appreciated this." The text is written in the vein of one of his favorite authors, Laurence Sterne, and it indulges in the discursions and the sudden pauses for reflections and appreciation and satire which one finds in Tristram Shandy. Rats, Lice and History purports to be the biography of a disease, typhus, and in passages of fascinating analysis he showed how that enemy of man by ravaging the armies of the Crusaders and those which Napoleon had led to Moscow had changed the fate of Europe. Hans's statistics were appalling and they came right down to our own time. I remember one in particular: "between 1917 and 1923 there were 30,000,000 cases of typhus with 3,000,000 deaths in European Russia alone."

In his digressions Hans spoke out as a scientist who dared challenge the arts. The cult of unintelligibility in poetry and criticism had aroused his ire, and now he had his fun with what was obscure and pretentious in contemporary literature. He satirized Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot (whose poetic gifts he did not question), he twitted Whitehead for being needlessly abstruse, and in his scrutiny he was unsparing and provocative as these samples indicate:

Freud is a great man. But it is dangerous when a great man is too easily half-understood. The Freudian high explosives have been worked into firecrackers for the simple to burn their fingers. It has become easy to make a noise and a bad smell with materials compounded by the great discoverer for the blasting of tunnels. . .

If an epidemiologist on a plague study talked and behaved in the manner of the hero of Arrowsmith, he would not only be useless, but he would be regarded as something of a yellow ass and a nuisance by his associates. And de Kruif is far too intelligent a man not to have known, when he wrote his thriller on Men Against Death, that raucous laughter would be its reception in the laboratories and in the field where the work he describes is being done.

The response to Rats, Lice and History was immediate. We went through four printings in the first month. Critics praised it for its erudition, and for the wit and penetration of the writing. Dr. Thomas Barbour, an old friend of Hans, reviewed it for the Atlantic, and I sent Hans advance galleys and received back this letter of protest:

"It was kind of you to send me Tom Barbour's review. It filled me with consternation, though I know how warmly it flowed out of a friendship for which I am very grateful. Can you tone down the personal stuff about my 'reckless courage' and getting myself injected, etc. a bit without hurting his feelings. Don't for anything let him know how it affected me. His heart is proportionate to the rest of him."

In an age which glorifies publicity, it is something of a surprise to find how rigorously opposed to it most professional men are. Hans was a martinet in this respect. He was opposed to our using photographs of him in our advertising, he went over the jacket blurb pruning out every reference which he thought excessive, and he kept an eagle eye on the advertising. I could not police what other editors did, though he thought I should have been able to, and when the Saturday Review reproduced a snapshot of him they had dug up from somewhere, I received a cable from the League of Nations Conference on Immunology reading: PLEASE PREVENT PUBLICATION MY PICTURE GIVES ME JITTERS. ZINSSER.

There was a lesson in this for me as for any editor, and Hans summed it up very fairly in a letter to me which deserves to be quoted:

It is quite natural that the points of view of publishers should be different from those of professional men, but since we work together we ought to explain ourselves clearly to each other. It is not merely my own personal opinion, but an almost accepted tenet among scientific men who do not wish to cheapen themselves and their profession, to avoid using any kind of scientific standing or reputation in advertising anything they may undertake in other directions. My writing is an entirely separate occupation, and while of course it is impossible to conceal the fact that I am also a bacteriologist and am writing to some extent about medical things, I would seriously object to any exploitation of whatever position I may hold in the scientific world or of scientific work I am doing for the sake of advertisement and efforts to increase the sales of any of my lay writings. It is not only a matter that is repugnant to me personally, but it would humiliate me as well in the eyes of my scientific peers.

The reception accorded to Rats, Lice and History was gratifying and the demand for the book continues to this day; the copy from which I have been quoting is from the twenty-fifth printing. Hans felt encouraged to go on, and he made some preliminary sketches about his parents in Westchester and some travelogues, etchings about Europe in the manner of the Sentimental Journey. As always this was done at night, for his program of research and teaching at the Medical School was a heavy one and the writing suffered from being spasmodic. "I stub my toe against the first person singular," he wrote in January 1937, "and know that I could write faster and better if, in some way, I could write more impersonally." What he was aiming for was, in his own words, "as much as possible, an optimistic Education of Henry Adams, somewhat disconnected, dealing with the educational career, medical development in America, episodes and occurrences in epidemic regions, war and hospital and university life, etc . . . . Of course, it sounds ambitious when I mention Henry Adams because I think he was a great artist, but I give you my model only because it was through a rereading of the Education that I conceived this plan."

The project came into focus when he decided to write, in the third person, the life of a bacteriologist who would be known as R.S., a medical man known intimately to Dr. Zinsser and whose career touched his at many points. This device freed Hans from the feeling of personal mortification; it gave him the opportunity to open or close doors as he pleased; it also gave him the opportunity of being very discursive. The writing was broken into by many interruptions, and when at last the first draft entitled "More Truth Than Poetry" was submitted, I had to tell him that we were disappointed. It was a work of great promise but it rambled, and there was too little live connective tissue to bind the parts together. I wrote out a chapter-by-chapter analysis indicating those pages and those passages that I was sure he could strengthen, and my notations read like this:

Chapter III Though I sympathize with everything you say through here, I do feel that this chapter is rather slow motion, especially if it is to be read so early in the book. It needs more narrative and locomotive power to carry your reflections on anti-Semitism. Couldn't you work into it one telling example of racial intolerance that has come within your experience? Were this inserted at the outset, it would give more movement to the whole.

Chapters IV and V Both of these need good chapter headings. Both of them have that static, essay quality which one expects of a philosophical discussion, but which is hardly appropriate to the robust years of adolescence, through which you are supposed to be passing at this time. Chapter IV seems to me the more vulnerable of the two, and although the episode about your mother is very moving, I think the chapter as a whole would be more effective were it moved back to serve as an interlude between the romantic reminiscences and the early medical life. Chapter V gives us an endearing picture of Woodberry, but here again I feel the need of spice, and the briskness of a little additional narrative. Would it be appropriate to mention your Spanish War experiences here by way of contrast, even though the episode be no longer than two pages?

Chapter XV, page 213 Your passing allusion to the New York cavalry and the Spanish War makes me wonder why this phase of R. S.'s experience did not receive its proper mention in his adolescent years. It would add spice to one of the early chapters, and chronologically it belongs there.

Chapter XVII, pages 235-8 This is the second time that you speak of the reaction against the Germans in America during the War. To avoid the repetition, might it not be better to move these episodes forward to that early chapter where the subject first arises? The episodes themselves are good.

There was much more, several pages single-spaced, and Hans took it in good heart, although it was clear to us both that the book would have to be deferred for at least a year.

Early in 1938 Dr. Zinsser was in China helping pupils of his stave off an epidemic of typhus which came raging on the heels of the Japanese invasion. He returned to Boston late that spring feeling below par and went for a physical checkup to his physician and personal friend Bill Breed. Perhaps he had already guessed what the finding would be for he took it stoically: he was incurably ill with lymphatic leukemia. He told me in July; he thought at that time that he had twelve months left and the thing he wanted most to do was to revise and finish that book. It was the first time I had seen one I loved under the death sentence, and his courage was contagious and wonderful. He carried on his work at the Medical School and in the laboratory; he submitted himself as a guinea pig for the most exhausting Xray treatment for leukemia, and in the evenings he devoted himself to the big manuscript. He was determined to finish it and "Damn you, don't you ever refer to it as an autobiography," he said jokingly, "for it isn't." I crossed Chestnut Street a number of times in those spring evenings, for under his relentless concentration the book came magnificently into the clear, a work in biography whose gaiety and laughter, whose tenderness, whose knowledge of men and of medicine make it unique.

The questions which it posed were fascinating. For instance, the text was sprinkled with foreign quotations, and the question was should they be translated. Hans said no. "I took a good deal of trouble with the style of this book, and it is my conviction that one must write naturally, as one thinks, and not cut up paragraphs with a lot of translations of minor phrases. . . The kind of audience for whom the book is largely meant will not be troubled by the present arrangement."

The question of the title was resolved by Mr. Sedgwick on a postcard. It read:

Of self-pity there is none in As I Remember Him. The note of poignancy heard toward the close is that life is of necessity so brief. "Ted," he said to me one morning when the book was nearly done, "if I could only find a raft to step onto from this old hulk --- there is so much more writing I would like to do." He did keep the "old hulk" afloat for a year longer than he expected and so lived to see the book published, selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and widely praised. I myself rank it on the very top shelf of American biography; for its warmth and clarity I think I should put it ahead of The Education of Henry Adams which was its prototype.

Hans had to answer all manner of embarrassing questions about the identity of R.S. Did the initials stand for his Romantic Self? No. Did they stand for Dr. Richard Strong, a contemporary of his at the School of Public Health? No. Did they speak for Lawrence Henderson in disguise? No. The simplest explanation perhaps is that they are the last letters in reverse of Hans's own name. The invasion of a doctor's privacy still troubled him. He objected to the tone of our advertising; he winced (and gave me hell) when Henry Seidel Canby, writing for the Book-of-the-Month Club News, constantly alluded to the volume as an autobiography; and he roared when a representative of Life telephoned him to say that they wanted to make a pictorial laboratory study for the magazine. "I told him that one of the strongest purposes of my life was to prevent that sort of thing from ever happening and I could promise him a flat refusal. I also indiscreetly said I would pay money not to have it done and would threaten him with murder if he did it. Nevertheless, perhaps thinking that he has the attributes of a snake charmer, he insisted on seeing me for five minutes tomorrow morning. I will try to make these five minutes interesting for him and will feel that I have done my duty to you thereby. The whole idea is dreadful, especially at a time like this."

Hans Zinsser was sixty-two when he died. In the memorial exercises which were held at the Harvard Medical School his colleagues and his students paid their tribute, and the most eloquent of them all was Dr. Enders, who said at the close: "And so it would seem that all his life he was preparing himself for these last two years, when he came to know that the end could not be far away. We who were with him then will ever be the better for having seen him tranquilly continuing his researches, writing his books, and teaching his students as if no term had been set. But the attainment of this inward calm was not as easy as he would have us believe from what he has written ...... At this point it seems appropriate to recall the words which Hans himself had written at the end of As I Remember Him: "As his disease caught up with him, R.S. felt increasingly grateful for the fact that death was coming to him with due warning, and gradually. So many times in his active life he had been near sudden death by accident, violence, or acute disease; and always he had thought that rapid and unexpected extinction would be most merciful. But now he was thankful that he had time to compose his spirit, and to spend a last year in affectionate and actually merry association with those dear to him."

DR. THOMAS BARBOUR, known to his friends as "T. B.," was a legend long before I ever knew him, a legend compounded in Florida, Cuba, Panama, the East Indies, Harvard, Boston, and Beverly Farms. The legend told me that he was big --- six foot five, 255 pounds in his prime --- with a curiosity and a generosity that went with his bigness; that he had a prodigious memory, and a hearty humor; was fearless; had a way with snakes, and a willow thumb for fossils. Rumor said that he had identified a vast number of reptiles and amphibians in North America and that his work on the birds of Cuba was unique. He did much of his work underground in caves, and when the going was dangerous he would unroll a ball of tough twine, the end of which he had secured to a tree at the cavern's mouth: this would serve as a guideline in case he had to back out.

"Why don't you get Tom Barbour to do you an article on snakes?" said my friend Theodora Codman. "He knows more about boa constrictors than any man living. Ask him about the one that escaped from his suitcase in the Pullman." But actually the first manuscript he wrote for us came uninvited in the summer of 1942, and it was a brief but very amusing account of some zoological atrocities which he had unearthed in the museums of Boston, Salem, and Cambridge. He spoke of horrors such as a cask containing the pickled heads of Chinese garnered many decades ago on the beach at San Francisco after a riot, and of absurdities such as the miscellaneous collection of gallstones which he ejected from the Peabody Museum in Salem --- more than a pint, and all donated except for "MRS. CHASE'S GALLSTONES," which, according to the card, were the largest and on loan --- and had been for a century. Dr. Barbour in his housecleaning of the Glory Holes, as he called the museums, gave fresh emphasis to the objects worth preserving and the cataloguing came alive. "Think what a story you can build about the giant tortoise of the Galapagos," he wrote. "The old whalers called them turpin. For generations all the ships that chanced to be near the Galapagos Islands, about six hundred miles southwestward of Panama, went ashore turtling. The crews carried the beasts down to the beach, boated them to the ships, and piled them up in their empty holds. Here, being the strange creatures that they are, they survived for months without food or water. When scurvy appeared the turtles were butchered. The flesh was savory even when poorly prepared. There was enough fat in each one to shorten a mess of duff, and the water in their bladders was cool and clear . . . Seventeen zoological species of turtles have been described. But this is not the point which we want the magnificent specimen at Salem to illustrate --rather, what turtles like this meant to seamen from the time of Dampier down to about 1867, when petroleum knocked out whale oil. Probably no fewer than half a million turpin were carried away, and now all the races of the creatures are rare or extinct."

When I accepted his article, it was natural to ask for more, and so our acquaintance began. I went out to Cambridge to lunch with him in his little private dining room, the "Eateria," a part of his spacious quarters in the Agassiz Museum, full of books, photographs, and curios. I remember that we had delicious chunks of fried eel with papaya for dessert. Dr. Barbour was gaunter than I had been led to suppose, but his head was massive with square-cut features, bushy brows, and a mass of thick white curls. His right hand had the habit of twisting and retwisting one of those curls, and I noticed that the hand itself trembled. Present were two of his good friends, Bill Claflin, then the Treasurer of Harvard, and Dr. Henry Bigelow, the famous oceanographer. The talk ranged widely; this was the closest I had ever come to biology and I tried to conceal my ignorance by listening, but I understood enough to realize that there were the makings of a remarkable book here.

Man's relation to the animals' world and theirs to their own peculiar environment, this had been Dr. Barbour's lifelong study; he strove to repopulate and to document the earth before spoliation, as his heroes Darwin and Wallace, Audubon and Bertram had done before him, and his travels had taken him everywhere, to remote islands like the Solomons, to deep-sea caves and tropical forests. On his honeymoon, which lasted two years, he and Mrs. Barbour had followed in Wallace's footsteps to India, Burma, and Malaya, along the Irrawaddy River to French Indo-China, and thence to China and Japan. He knew the interior of Brazil and had crossed the Andes; Panama was like the back of his hand; he had been twelve times to Cuba, twenty-two times to the West Indies. The editorial problem was how to segregate such rich but diverse material; how to shape the continuity so that the pungent anecdotes would build the interest instead of being self-contained, and how to get it all on paper.

Dr. Barbour suffered from a heart condition which had left him agitated and apprehensive; it was clear that any writing he did longhand would have to be sustained by relaxed periods of dictation. His health was much on his mind. "I can't sleep," he complained to me early in our friendship. "I wake up every morning at five."

"What time do you go to bed?" I asked, being an insomniac myself.

"Oh, about ten."

"Well, that's not too bad," I said. "Seven hours. What do you do when you wake up?"

"I just lie there," he said pitifully, "and listen to the soughing of the pines." (This was at his summer place in Beverly Farms.)

"Well, instead of suffering," I suggested, "why don't you begin to think of the new episodes you're going to dictate, and when they are clear in mind, have breakfast and be driven up to Cambridge?" Miss Helene Anderson, his infallible secretary, did not thank me for this, for it resulted in his appearance in the Museum at sunup --- and hers, too --- but it explains why the first draft came so quickly into being. It was at this point that we became "Tom" and "Ted" to each other.

Reminiscences when they are dictated tend to move in circles. Tom's chapters as he first thought them out took off, again and again, with his grandmother as a focal point --- for reasons I shall come to --- or they began with his fabulous honeymoon; they would then follow out a line of thought or an expedition with its glorious, unpredictable sidelights, zoom through the years and come back to Cambridge and the present. His text sounded like his talk; it was charged with affection and gusto, it avoided self-dramatization, laughed at himself and his exploits in the field, and was agreeably random as it moved from the great botanists to memorable meals to butterflies to pygmy lemurs to whales. Repetitions crop out much more frequently in dictation than they do in handwriting, where the eye can catch them, and I soon came to know Tom's pet phrases. "It was my great good fortune" was one of them, and my fortune would be greater if I had a dollar for every time that I removed that tag from the beginning of one of his paragraphs. "Which has hitherto eluded notice" was another frequent customer, and I could tell that T. B. was getting tired when I met the cliché "Well, to make a long story short." But these were minor irritants; much of this was high-grade ore, and when we had a large chunk of it in type my enthusiasm prompted me to show it to my associates at Little, Brown.

Their reaction was not as expected. Roger Scaife's report began: "Thomas Barbour is a great man, a greater individualist, and the world's worst writer. I can't conceive of Weeks' sending it over in its present condition . . ." Ray Everett expressed the hope that we could divert it to a university press and Alfred McIntyre, who was the referee in such matters, wrote: "On the basis of the enclosed reports, it looks to us as if the Barbour manuscript needed the old Weeks touch and a great deal of work by said Mr. Weeks. I recall that some of our comments on the first draft of Zinsser's last book were a little discouraging but that you were able to pull it together . . ." I can explain some of this by saying that at the time William Beebe was the popular naturalist in print and that Beebe's prose was bland and silk-smooth. Compared to Will Beebe, T. B. was a diamond in the rough. But it might be quite a diamond!

For uncounted hours in the next seven months my assistant Dudley Cloud and I worked on the revision of Tom's manuscript. We removed the repetitions; we aerated the paragraphs which were too tight-packed; we questioned Tom about those areas where our curiosity had been aroused but not satisfied.

And we helped him rewrite --- or ourselves rewrote --- every second sentence. All scientists talk and write in a jargon which becomes the shorthand of their calling but which when reduced to print can be a very punishing, cryptic English for the layman. (The social scientists and the psychologists are the worst offenders in this.) Tom responded to our probing; his memory was sunlit and like an IBM machine; he knew the Latin name and physical properties of every specimen he had ever identified and with a smile he would recall the particular hazards he had encountered in the more difficult quests. So the text took an additional color and depth.

This would be an impulsive book, not a step-by-step autobiography. We regrouped the contents under three headings: the first, the experiences of the young T. B. in the field, we called "The Making of a Naturalist." The next section described his life as a museum director and gave informal, affectionate portraits of his heroes and friends --- Louis and Alexander Agassiz, March Cope and Shaler; David Fairchild, John Phillips, Alfred Kidder and Henry Bigelow. The final third, under the subtitle "The Leisurely Approach," showed the more reflective naturalist; here we put the agreeable voyages to Central America aboard his friend Allison Armour's yacht; his vivid speculation on whales; his account of the sanctuaries in Panama, Cuba and Florida which he had fought to preserve; his chapter on evolution which, in a very few pages, went to the heart of the question, and the philosophical walks and talks which he used to have with his summer neighbor, Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The tributes which he bestowed on all those who had served him loyally at Harvard we placed in an appendix.

The manuscript was resubmitted for judgment, and was accepted with the comment from Scaife that it was "vastly improved." Under my title Naturalist at Large it appeared in the fall of 1943, went through three printings before Christmas, and five more were called for thereafter. Not a spectacular sale but a steady one for a book which is truly an American landmark, a book which I believe the suburban-bound Americans of the future will resurrect because of what it tells, as David Fairchild puts it, "of this vanishing world of forests and prairies, watercourses and bubbling springs --- the world of wild animals and untouched wilderness."

While the revision was still in progress Tom was literally pouring out, like a magnum from which the cork has been drawn, the contents of his second book, about the state which was dearest to him, Florida. He was dictating more skillfully now, but my friendly questioning sessions continued and that I must occasionally have kept him waiting I see from the inscription of the photograph he then gave me: "To the Timeless Weeks from the poor, punctual, old cuss, T. B." He was in a hurry.

What diverts a unique mind from the habitual pursuits, the practice of law or of medicine, or, as in Tom's case, from the manufacture of linen thread, the family's mainstay since 1784? T. B. was blest with sharp eyesight and a photographic memory, but it was his grandmother who put him on his way. She must have been a remarkable and perceptive woman, Sarah Elizabeth Barbour: small, fine-featured and alert as she looks out at us from the picture taken on her veranda in Eau Gallie in 1898. That was the year when Tom, recuperating from typhoid, made his first visit to her in Florida. Walden Cottage was what she called her spacious, white-frame house on the Indian River, and the name speaks for the impetus she was to give the boy. In a fishing launch with an engine made of solid bronze - "Grandmother hated the idea of sitting near a rusty engine" --- she and her fourteen-year-old grandson went fishing, trolling for sea trout. The channel deepened opposite Merritt's Island where the Indian and the Banana Rivers join and here they passed back and forth across the front of a great shell mound, thirty feet high from the river shore to its top. As the hand line throbbed in their fingers they speculated about this great mound, and she fired his imagination. "We often talked about how smelly the top of the mound must have been," he wrote, "as a dwelling place, for of course the whole great accumulation was formed by Indians sitting around their camp fires and for years unnumbered throwing the shells of the mollusks they ate over their shoulders, so to speak." Her desire to unlock the past gave him confidence; it imbued him with a single purpose. A year later in 1899 Tom visited Cambridge, and on his first trip to the Agassiz Museum, officially known as the Museum of Comparative Zoology, he spotted some specimens which he believed to be mislabeled --- as indeed they were --- and there and then he resolved that one day he should become its director.

Florida played a formative, indeed incisive, part in his career. He came to it first when Miami was a settlement of a few hundred, and as David Fairchild has said, he was "the last of the great naturalists to have set foot in Florida when its charm as a naturalist's paradise was still unchanged by fires and canals and roadways" --- the roadways that now bring to it eight million tourists a year. There has been nothing quite like this rise of a great tropical peninsula from its days of wilderness and beauty to one of cities and civilization. Tom saw it all. For half a century he dug and collected, hunted and fished his way through the 67 counties. He had a Model T station wagon rebuilt for his expeditions: little cupboards for the onions, sweet potatoes and other staples; slings overhead for the guns, and a rear compartment for a tent, folding chairs, camp cots, and a dog. With Rosamond, his wife, and their inseparable friend, John Phillips the naturalist, and Frank Carlisle for their man Friday, they explored the waterways, the forests and scrub, and Tom's findings as he dictated them for his second book, That Vanishing Eden, made it an invigorating and poignant classic. Poignant, because so much of the wildness that he saw is gone.

There is an old saying that "he who fishes most catches most." One day when Frank Carlisle was rowing the boat and Tom, in the stern, trolling for big-mouth black bass, as Tom tells it, "I looked up --- and there, sticking out of the canal bank just above the water level, was a little black patch of something, a couple of square inches in area. I said, without feeling much of the spirit of surprise: 'There's an elephant's tooth.' Frank was utterly bewildered and began to argue that there had been no circus about." They put ashore and Tom dug the tooth free with his fingers, for the sand was soft. He marked the spot, and on his return sometime later he unearthed the great shoulder blade and other fragments of a gigantic elephant, a beast which he estimated was over thirteen feet tall.

It was Tom's passion to preserve, and when the Barbour fortune permitted, he bought what would otherwise be destroyed. So it was with the old Raeford Thomas Farm, 45 miles from Gainesville and long abandoned, which Tom bought and deeded to the University of Florida. Fossils of the Lower Miocene Age were found here, and when Tom took control the "dig" deepened to an excavation from which came the skull of a rhinoceros, the remains of small camels, and other ancient beasts which seemed so far removed from our continent. When Rosamond visited the excavation in 1944 she too began to dig, and before the afternoon was over she had accumulated quite a number of bones, including the molar tooth of a giant rodent, an earlier, angrier forefather of the North American porcupine. "Here," said Tom, "in a short space of time spent scratching about she had found evidence of the presence of a whole category of animals, no vestige of which had ever appeared before." When such things happened to the Barbours, it wasn't just luck.

Tom's home place in Florida after the death of his grandmother was the Kampong, the eight-acre estate which David and Marion Fairchild had converted into a tropical garden. Tom loved everything about it: the old original house of silvery-gray pine; David's office in the ancient potting shed with the workroom on the second floor nested right in the heart of a live oak. Tom admired what David had done with the oriental trees and flowering shrubs which flourished in this rich tropical earth as if they had been planted here for centuries; he doted on the exotic food which David delighted to serve: the Chinese jujubes and persimmons, the dasheen which David tried to persuade me was richer than any potato, the mangoes, alligator pears and always the delicious fish. The Fairchilds had built a little bungalow of native stone for Tom and it became his sanctuary. He was always up at dawn, would cook his own breakfast, and then go down to watch the sunrise across the bay and to enjoy the flight of the pelicans, the gulls and grebes and egrets. The bungalow was his hideaway, and in it he planned and wrote most of his book on Florida.

The Kampong preserved the Florida that might have been. The instinct to safeguard for perpetuity small areas of virgin natural beauty prompted T. B. as it prompted Thoreau. It prompted him to take a leading part with his friends Robert and Nell Montgomery in the creation of the Fairchild Tropical Garden; it prompted him to join with John Phillips in setting aside a small forest of virgin pine in New Hampshire; it prompted him to establish the Barro Colorado Island Laboratory on a tropical hilltop, filled with wildlife, which had suddenly become an island with the flooding of Gatun Lake in Panama; it prompted his gifts and his devotion to the Garden at Soledad in Cuba.

I have said enough to indicate that what Grandmother Barbour began, Rosamond carried through to completion. It was indeed Tom's "extreme good fortune," to use his words, that he found Rosamond. Her humor equaled his, and was saucier; her resourcefulness, her courage, her adaptability --- which could hardly have been pre-tested in the Back Bay --- were equal to any occasion.

They were married in 1906 when she was twenty-three, and then set forth on that honeymoon which was to take her to the most improbable spots. In her Gibson girl trousseau, the long skirt, blouse with high whalebone collar, straw boater with a wide brim, white gloves and a gay parasol --- a parasol to match each dress --- she suddenly found herself transported to New Guinea and so photographed in the center of an admiring tribe of pygmies who were as naked as Adam. When they came to Lucknow in India, she and Tom were taken to a village which had been terrified by a giant cobra. The cobra lived in a burrow near the path leading to the village; only a few days before the Barbours arrived a child had been bitten and had died. No native was going to take a chance with that cobra, but Tom decided to go after it. Here is how he describes it in Naturalist at Large.:

We trudged out across the dusty plain and came at last to the little hole where the villagers said the cobra lived. I had an old entrenching tool which I used to dig insects out of rotten logs, and with this I commenced to enlarge the hole cutting down in the hard-baked earth. I got down about a foot before I saw what was obviously the skin of either a lizard or a snake. I gave it a poke with my digger and out came the most magnificent cobra you ever saw.

It came out, reared up, its beady eyes peering from side to side as it moved its head inquiringly, its tongue flashing. I had to have a picture of it. [Tom's camera was one of those large old-fashioned boxlike contraptions in which you insert a whole plate.] I got the picture by lying down on the ground and edging up until I was right in front of the snake. My wife stood by with an open parasol and when the cobra saw fit to make a nip at the camera, which meant coming pretty close to my face and hands, she would lower the parasol in front of him and he would sway back and straighten up again. I took a number of excellent photographs and then carefully shot the snake with a charge of dust-shot in a .38 cartridge so as to damage him as little as possible.

Ros never lost her composure, not even on that afternoon in India when she and Tom had been collecting butterflies. There were clumps of flowering shrubs, waist high, and in they waded, making passes with the net until, happening to look up, they saw before them in a small clearing "a perfectly magnificent tiger ---" the phrase is Tom's --- "his tail straight in the air, its tip flicking." Since there was no place for them to run to, they simply stood there side by side with that absurd butterfly net --- and watched the tiger walk majestically out of sight.

To think of Tom is to remember some of the stories which created his legend and to which he added fresh luster every day he lived. He is a sophomore at Harvard and instead of worrying about clubs he is striving to win the approval of Alexander Agassiz. Agassiz, who has been exploring the sea, is deep in a study of coral reefs, so, come summer vacation, T. B. charters a schooner to dredge for sponges in the Bahamas. The reward is in Tom's words: "He was obviously interested in what we found, and I remember one sponge over which he was really excited."

There is a postscript to this: he found that regularly at 10 o'clock each evening Agassiz was in Cambridge "he would go to the Holly Tree at Harvard Square, famous for its beautifully poached eggs. He would eat two of these, drink a glass of beer and then walk back to his house on Quincy Street. I made bold to meet him there quite casually and after a while often walked home with him." This singleness of purpose is endearing; how else could an undergraduate get close enough to question Agassiz informally.

Whatever he did was in his style. He was showing Theodora Codman the collection of pickled snakes in the Museum, and she remarked that one of them which had its head stuck out of the jar must be disintegrating. Tom reached it down, thrust his nose deep, inhaled and came up with a grin. "Sweet as a nut," he said.

David Fairchild, the plant explorer, was, as I have said, Tom's mentor, and David's famous book The World Is My Garden a model never to be attained. But when David read an advance copy of Naturalist at Large, he wrote to T. B. in Boston:

Tom's voice was hoarse and low and he said things like that with a brusqueness to cover his emotion.

On a walk through the Harvard Yard with President Lowell, Tom expressed his dismay at the disappearance of all the great characters in the college: Shaler gone, Professor Sophocles, William James, and Kittredge about to retire, the whole place had lost the zest, there were no characters left.

"Tom," said the President, "how long since you've looked in the mirror?"