brilliant of division commanders.  There is a photograph in existence portraying Hancock and his division generals as they appeared during that terrible campaign.  It was taken in the woods in the utmost stress of service.  Barlow stands in the group just as he looked in college, the face thin and beardless, almost that of a boy, and marked with the nonchalance which always characterised him.  There are no military trappings, a rough checked shirt, trousers, slouching from the waist to campaign boots, hang loosely about the attenuated limbs.  Soon after that he was carried from the field, not wounded, but in utter exhaustion after exposures which no power of will could surmount.  A few months’ respite and he was at his post again, intercepting by a swift march Lee’s retreating column, almost the last warlike act of the Army of the Potomac before Appomattox.  In this “Last Leaf” I do not deal with “might-have-beens.”  I only remember, but we old classmates of Barlow have a feeling that had the war continued, if only the bullets to which he was always so hospitable had spared him, he would have gone on to the command of a corps, and perhaps even to greater distinctions.  The photograph of Barlow, published after his death in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, presents him as he was soon after the war was over.  He had recovered from the hardships, the face is fairly well rounded but still rather that of a beardless, laughing boy than of a man.  A stranger studying the face would hear with incredulity the story of the responsibilities and dangers which that face had confronted.  He laughed it all off lightly, and that was his way when occasionally in his later years he came to our meetings.

I recall a reunion in 1865, ten years after our graduation.  We sat in full numbers about a sumptuous banquet at the Parker House in Boston, and naturally in that year the returned soldiers were in the foreground.  In our class were two major-generals, four colonels, a distinguished surgeon, and many more of lower rank.  Barlow was the central figure.  Theodore Lyman, who presided, introduced him with a glowing tribute, recounting his achievements, a long list from the time he had entered as a private to his culmination as a full Major-General.  He called at last for nine cheers for the man who had captured the Spottsylvania salient, and we gave them with a roar that shook the building.  Barlow was the only man in the room who showed not the slightest emotion.  He stood impassive, his face wearing his queer smile.  Other men might have been abashed at the tumultuous warmth of such a reception from his old mates; a natural utterance at such a time would have been an expression of joy that the war was over and that the country had been saved, coupled with modest satisfaction that he had borne some part in the great vindication, but that was not Barlow’s way.  He laughed it off lightly, as if it had been a huge joke.  My classmate, the late Joseph Willard of Boston, told