ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

. Early Environment and Schooling. 467
memory so &:tn. He recalled better than I did-at well past
sixty (I was several years his jwtior), names and traits and incidents.
Indeed the whole panorama of that early life wtrolled
before me as we talked.
I have noted that many men, perhaps even a majority, are
only half-hearted when they talk about early days,-there is a
veiled reserve--something that they would forget-something
that perhaps they are half ashamed of; but Dr. Hyslop discoursed
almost rapturously about that simple early life in the queer little
one-horse college in the Ohio village nine miles even from a railroad
in the early seventies.
I had known years before I met him that he was an old
"Northwood" boy, but it seemed to me somehow that his time
must have been wasted there, the man was so big and the school
was so little. If he ever had that feeling in his long an\:1 distinguished
career I am sure he swamped it at once in a ftood of
loving recollections. That was the only impression left after a
long evening I once spent with him going over old scenes more in
detail. He was interested in me first and foremost as an old
"Northwood" boy, and he wanted to know all I knew about the
place. The scientific mind with its eager pursuit of facts never
showed itself more firmly than here.
This genuineness and simplicity of soul are characteristic of
everything he did. It was the fine flowering of a splendid stock.
Like William James, his brother in psychic research, he came of
sturdy Scotch-Irish extraction. Unlike James, it must be remarked
at once, however, he had no such early advantages. The
former was born to an inheritance of wealth and culture and had
every opportunity from his earliest days, James H. Hyslop was
the son of an Ohio farmer, a man who feared God, raised good
crops, and sent his son to school in the hope of making a minister
of him. Truly, there was no royal road to learning in his case.
The path was narrow, the way was long, and always beset with
poverty. It was a hard, stem school from the beginning. There
was nothing about Northwood to tempt a man of any intellectual
ambition. The place was more likely to spoil a good scholar than
to make one. Supported by one of the best bodies of people who
at the same time hugged one of the narrowest creeds in all Christendom-the
Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America-
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