therefore he entered the office of Stickney and Tuck, of Exeter. Here he remained for eighteen months, with the triple object of learning office work, saving up his money, and preparing himself for the Harvard Law School.
Again he had anticipated the elementary work, and in November, 1851, he joined the School in the senior class. Parker, Parsons, and Greenleaf, then all recent appointees, were his professors. But his sternest master was poverty. As at Exeter, he had to work his passage. He obtained the position of student librarian, which gave him free lodgings in one of the small rooms on the upper floor of Dane Hall. He assisted Parsons to collect the material for his great work on contracts. Did he then plan, we may wonder, a greater work on contracts, by himself? Did he ever dream that he should one day take the chair of his instructor? Was it from pondering the wish of the founder of that chair that he became convinced that the law is a science?
That was the conviction, at all events, that gradually took possession of the shy young law student—the pivot on which a whole system of legal instruction was later to be swung aside into limbo. To his cronies he would dilate on that conviction with all the strength and fascination of his budding powers. Law was a science—a branch of human reasoning coördinated,
