New Englander and the New Englander's determination to excel the rest of mankind.

Presi

dent Robbins, of the Waltham Watch Company, once told me that once a year he sent an accom

that your Waltham watch is one of a company

of a million or two, one of which on one happy

day once corrected the standard of Greenwich Observatory.

I spoke just now of beavers at the north and of the picture gallery in Bowdoin College which is within smell of the ocean on the south. Do not go up to the north to kill beavers, but you may make yourself a "camp" there and stay a fortnight while you watch their sensible enterprises. Or go down to the Commencement at Bowdoin and find yourself in the midst of their traditions of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Andrew, Chandler, Packard, and Upham, or in that fresh present life which Dr. Hyde leads so well.

I loitered there one day to study the crayons and other drawings which the younger Bowdoin brought from Spain and from Italy. I had never seen that collection rivalled excepting one day when Ruskin showed me somewhat similar portfolios in English Oxford, and I cannot help wishing that somebody, even now, would give us a study of the lives of the two Bowdoins, father and son. Here was the Governor of Massachusetts who, under the name of the "President of the Council," "ran Massachusetts" from 1775 till 1780, and afterwards succeeded

Hancock as Governor. Here was his son who was travelling in Europe when Lexington called him home. He was one of our early diplomatists, and he became the benefactor of Bowdoin College. He left his library, his philosophical reports, and his paintings, with six thousand acres of land and the reversion of the island of Naushon, to this College. His mineralogical collection was the nucleus of the cabinets which Professor Cleveland studied and illustrated.

Ah! here is one of my failures to put the right thread into the right needle at the right time. It must be twenty years ago that I was the guest of the College for some function, and had the pleasure of sitting at the Commencement dinner. Dr. Packard was presiding, loved and honored by everybody who knew him. James Gillespie Blaine was at the height of his fame, and admired and loved by everybody in that assembly. And when he was called upon to speak he spoke with all that personal charm which belonged to his speeches when he was talking of that which really interested him. He

characterized Dr. Packard to his face, and, to our delight, told us what manner of man he was. With an old reporter's instinct, I seized

PROFESSOR ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD.

After the painting by F. P. Vinton in the Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College.

the printed menu at my side and began writing on the back the words as they fell from his lips; but in an instant more some Philistine voice said within me: "Why do you do this? There are

E

six reporters at their table eagerly taking it better than you could." And I laid my pencil by. Alas and alas! there was some football match at Princeton or at Harlem that day. The blue pencil of all editorial offices struck out Mr. Blaine's address for the more important details of a touchdown by Smith when Jones had dropped the ball in the gravel, and so that speech was lost. Before the week was over Dr. Packard had died, and I have been left with the wish that on a great occasion I had done what I wanted to do and could do.

MORAL. It is always better to do a thing than not to do it, if you remember duly the Twelve Commandments.

Yes, if there were room to talk of people, there are many, many men who won their laurels in Maine who deserve a place in any Hall of Fame: Champlain, whose monument is his own lake; Baron Castine, whose life is a romance; Knox, who "created all the stores of war" and has left behind him men and women for whom we are all grateful (he went down to Maine and