ting the worst of it, pulled out a big barlow knife: the circle of watchers were too much awed to do anything at first; but on seeing Sidney rush forward as determinedly as ever and tackle his opponent in spite of this wicked looking weapon, they all closed in and separated the pair.

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Another thing which marked him out among the boys who were getting ready for college at the 'Cademy," was a native musical ability. Before he was six he would rattle a rhythmical accompaniment on the bones in perfect time to his mother's piano music; at seven he had made himself a reed flageolet, and when Christmas brought a little onekeyed yellow flute he would shut himself up after school and practise by the hour on this. His mother taught him the notes on the piano, and he promptly passed on this new knowledge to John Booker, a musical negro barber of the neighborhood (who later had a famous troupe of darky minstrels which toured this country and Europe). Presently he had a minstrel troupe of his own among his boy friends, and learning to play passably well on half a dozen instruments before he could write legibly, he was always the centre of a gay quartet, an amateur band, or some more ambitious musical group.

Just before his fifteenth birthday he entered Oglethorpe College; but his father, who though devotedly fond of him, was always fearful of the quickness of his impulses and of his passion for music, withdrew him presently on hearing of him as leader in the serenading parties of the college boys. So he spent most of a year as a clerk in the

Macon post-office, entertaining family and friends with a host of comical stories of the queer backcountry folk who came in for mail; and then, in 1858, he returned to Oglethorpe, entering as a Junior.

There were many evidences during these years of an unusual combination of mental qualities. He had the true scholar's passion for exact knowledge (much fostered by contact with James Woodrow, a man of rare quality, who became interested in the alert young student, and gave him something of his own confident outlook on the new world then opening in science through the work of Darwin and Huxley); hard work and quick intellect put him at the head of his classes, and he especially distinguished himself in mathematics; yet at the same time he was absorbing Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, and the other great poets, and beginning on quiet walks in the woods to try to express some of the poetic fancies to which his reveries had given birth-efforts resulting at that time in "mere doggerel," according to one intimate; a keen delight in the picturesque romances of the days of chivalry, in the humor and whimsicalities and conceits of Montaigne, Burton, Don Quixote, Reynard the Fox, went side by side with a profound satisfaction in the mystical and metaphysical speculations of German philosophers, to whom he was drawn through his pleasure in Carlyle; he had begun to play the violin with such effect upon himself that he would at times lose consciousness and come to his senses hours later, much shaken in nerves.

His father was fearful of this musical stimulation, and induced him to give up that instrument; so, returning to the flute on which he had specialized since his childhood days, he soon had organized a quartet of gay flute and guitar players which, after much practising together, would sally forth on Friday evenings to serenade the pretty girls of the village. On these excursions he was the musical leader and the life of the party. When things went wrong they laughed at themselves:

"I recall on one very cold winter night," says a college comrade, "when the serenading party, with benumbed fingers, had performed the three or four conventional tunes of the serenade at the house of General Lamar, whose daughter was one of the local belles, that the gray-haired butler appeared at the door, not to invite the chilled troubadours into a warm parlor for refreshments, but to announce that 'Marsa an' de young ladies done been down to de plantation 'bout a week.'"

Often the group would meet in the evening, and Lanier would start forth on an improvisation; calling out the key, he would dash into an endless stream of melody, his friends accompanying as best they could-the whole frequently ending in some uproarious darky breakdown. He was in the thick of all the jokes; one morning, at the boarding-house, a passage of wits between him and an excitable companion proved too much for the other's nerves: he made an insulting remark. Lanier promptly struck him. The young man lost his head completely, pulled out a knife, and gave his adversary

a bad cut in the back-the affair ending in a hearty reconciliation, with the knife-wielder nursing Lanier while he was laid up. In those days Southern boys had the old time idea of resenting affronts, but in spite of a naturally quick temper, this is the only personal difficulty related of Lanier's college days, and, with a group of devoted friends, he seems to have had no enemies.

These years of hard study, reading, dreaming, music, serenading and college larks passed away. Lanier graduated at the head of his class, with an ambitious essay on "The Philosophy of History," dividing first honors with a fellow-senior, and on the day of his graduation was appointed tutor by the authorities. After a delightful summer of hunting and fishing and friends and music at his grandfather's estate in the Tennessee Mountains, he took up his new duties.

He was eighteen years old. The thoughtfulness which underlay his buoyant spirits is shown by a passage in his note-book at this time, when he was trying to decide upon his future:

"The point I wish to settle is merely by what method shall I ascertain what I am fit for. I am more than all perplexed by this fact: that the prime inclination—that is, natural bent (which I have checked, though) of my nature is to music, and for that I have the greatest talent; indeed, not boasting, for God gave it me, I have an extraordinary musical talent, and feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high as any composer. But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician,

because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things, which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?""

Sixty years ago, in Georgia, it would have been ludicrous to suggest music as a career for an ambitious young man. Lanier's look ahead presently resolved itself into a couple of years' hard study, mainly at Greek and German, while tutoring; then some more years in a German university; and then a professorship at an American college, where he might be able to work out some of his creative dreams, especially a musical drama of the peasant uprising in France in 1358, The Jacquerie, of which he had long been thinking (and a fragment of which is to be found in his complete Poems). He set himself resolutely towards this, and the next six months was a period of earnest study and teaching. His flute was still his ever present means of expression, and a friend of those days writes:

"Lanier's passion for music asserted itself at every opportunity. His flute and guitar furnished recreation for himself and pleasant entertainment for the friends dropping in upon him. As a master of the flute he was said to be, even at eighteen, without an equal in Georgia. 'Tutor Lanier,' I find myself recording at the time, 'is the finest flute-· player you or I ever saw. It is perfectly splendid -his playing. He is far famed for it. . . . Description is inadequate.""

This life of scholarship and music did not last long. The tension between North and South grew