i have missed you very much since your return to america my dear for you are the one man upon this earth to whom i have ever been able to open my whole mind i don t know why it is for now that i come to think of it i have never enjoyed very much of your confidence in return but that may be my fault perhaps you don t find me sympathetic even though i have every wish to be i can only say that i find you intensely so and perhaps i presume too much upon the fact but no every instinct in my nature tells me that i don t bore you by my confidences can you remember at the university you never were in the set and so it is possible that you don t anyway i ll take � the letters it for granted that you don t and explain it all from the beginning tm sure that you would know his photograph however for the reason that he was the and looking man of our year physically he was a fine � one of the � and most determined forwards that i have ever known though he played so savage a game that he was never given his cap he was well grown five foot nine perhaps with square shoulders an chest and a quick way of walking he had a round strong head with short black hair his face was wonderfully ugly but it was the of character which is as attractive as beauty his jaw and eyebrows were and rough his nose and red shot his eyes small and near set light blue in colour and capable of assuming a very genial and also an exceedingly expression a slight moustache covered his upper lip and his teeth were yellow strong and add to this that he seldom wore collar or that his throat was the colour and texture of the bark of a scotch fir and that he had a voice and the letters daily a laugh like a bull s then you have some idea if you can piece all these in your mind of the outward james but the inner man after all was what was most worth noting i don t pretend to know what genius is s definition always seemed to me to be a very crisp and clear statement of what it is not far from its being an infinite capacity for taking pains its leading characteristic as far as i have ever been able to observe it has been that it allows the possessor of it to attain results by a sort of instinct which other men could only reach by hard work in this sense was the greatest genius that i have ever known he never seemed to work and yet he took the prize over the heads of all the ten hour a day men that might not count for much for he was quite capable of all day and then reading desperately all night but start a subject of your own for him and then see his originality and strength talk about and he would catch up a pencil and on the back of an old envelope from his pocket he would sketch out some novel contrivance for piercing a ship s and the letters getting at her side which might no doubt involve some impossibility but which would at least be quite plausible and new then as he drew his eyebrows would contract his small eyes would gleam with excitement his lips would be pressed together and he would end by on the paper with his open hand and shouting in his exultation you would think that his one mission in life was to invent but next instant if you were to express surprise as to how it was that the egyptian workmen elevated the stones to the top of the out would come the pencil and envelope and he would a scheme for doing that with equal energy and conviction this ingenuity was joined to an extremely sanguine nature as he paced up and down in his quick stepping fashion after one of these flights of invention he would take out for it receive you as his partner in the enterprise have it adopted in every country see all conceivable of it count up his probable sketch out the novel methods in which he would invest his gains and finally retire with the most gigantic fortune that has ever been and you the letters would be swept along by his words and would be carried every foot of the way with him so that it would come as quite a shock to you when you suddenly fell back to earth again and found yourself the city street a poor student with s under your arm and hardly the price of your luncheon in your pocket i read over what i have written but i can see that i give you no real insight into the cleverness of his views upon medicine were most but i that if things fulfil their promise i may have a good deal to say about them in the with his brilliant and unusual gifts his fine record his strange way of dressing his hat on the back of his head and his throat bare his thundering voice and his ugly powerful face he had quite the most marked individuality of any man that i have ever known now you will think me rather about this man but as it looks as if his life might become with mine it is a subject of immediate interest to me and i am writing all this for the purpose of my own half faded impressions as well as in the hope of amusing the letters and interesting you so i must just give you one or two other points which may make his character more clear to you 