Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

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XVIII. James Elliot Cabot

Our late associate, Elliot Cabot, of whom I have been appointed to write a sketch, was to me, from my college days, an object of peculiar interest, on a variety of grounds. He was distantly related to me, in more than one way, through the endless intermarriages of the old Essex County families. Though two years and a half older, he was but one year in advance of me in Harvard College. He and his chum, Henry Bryant, who had been my schoolmate, were among the early founders of the Harvard Natural History Society, then lately established, of which I was an ardent member; and I have never had such a sensation of earthly glory as when I succeeded Bryant in the responsible function of Curator of Entomology in that august body. I used sometimes in summer to encounter Cabot in the Fresh Pond marshes, then undrained, which he afterwards described so delightfully in the Atlantic Monthly in his paper entitled “Sedge birds” (xxiii, 384). On these occasions he bore his gun, and I only the humbler weapon of a butterfly net. After we had left college, I looked upon him with envy as one of