In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago, as an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at college, and brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at the Lanfears’ when the boys arrived, and I shall never forget Dredge’s first appearance on the scene. You know the Lanfears always lived very simply. That summer they had gone to Buzzard’s Bay, in order that Professor Lanfear might be near the Biological Station at Wood’s Holl, and they were picnicking in a kind of sketchy bungalow without any attempt at elegance. But Galen Dredge couldn’t have been more awe-struck if he’d been suddenly plunged into a Fifth Avenue ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear’s foot, and became hopelessly entangled in her mother’s draperies—though how he managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear’s dowdy muslins ran to no excess of train.

When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw then that Dredge’s emotion was a tribute to the great man’s proximity. That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch. Archie, always enthusiastic but vague, had said: “Oh, he’s a tremendous chap—you’ll see—” but I hadn’t expected to see quite so clearly. Lanfear’s vision, of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried Dredge off to the Biological Station. And that was the way it began.

Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New York State, and was working his way through college—waiting at White Mountain hotels in summer—when Archie Lanfear ran across him. There were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid. Dredge never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother wanted him to be a scholar, and “kept at him,” as he put it, in the hope of his going back to “teach school” at East Lethe. He developed slowly, as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard’s Bay. But he had read Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation,” and had always been a patient and curious observer of nature. And his first meeting with Lanfear explained him to himself. It didn’t, however, enable him to explain himself to others, and for a long time he remained, to all but Lanfear, an object of incredulity and conjecture.