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[68] and this has no slight claim to remembrance. James Freeman Clarke was at one time its principal, and Dr. Holmes has touched it with his luminous pencil in one of his papers in the Atlantic. Besides the Poet-Autocrat it reckoned among its pupils Richard H. Dana, who was by and by to write his “Two years before the Mast,” and later to become eminent in many directions; and Margaret Fuller, the most remarkable woman that Cambridge has produced. It is doubtful if any or all of our existing grammar schools have “names to conjure with” like these of Holmes, Dana and Margaret Fuller. Yet the C. P. P. G. did not count hundreds: we were but thirty. Those of us who rank among the undistinguished were of course mighty and most honorable, howbeit as is said in the Book of Samuel, we “attained not unto the first three.”

Our schoolhouse stood on the south side of Austin street, about midway between Temple and Prospect streets. Nearly opposite were the houses of Dr. Chaplin and Judge Fay with gardens on each side extending from Prospect street to Inman and back almost to Harvard street. Dr. Chaplin was a then celebrated physician. Several cottages in the garden were occupied by his insane patients whom the boys and girls in the school opposite used to see walking about the grounds, or riding forth, a melancholy troop of six or eight. They were always mounted on white horses, sometimes with the stately doctor at their head, oftener with an attendant. This man was an early and zealous abolitionist, and as for some reason now forgotten the school had taken a dislike to him, among its lessons were laid up the resolutions not “to go crazy,” even for the sake of riding on white

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Oliver Wendell Holmes (2)
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Richard H. Dana (2)
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Ralph Inman (1)
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