Swabian Alps. It was my privilege to live under the same roof with him for those three months, and to cement a friendship which for four-and-twenty years has been one of the choicest blessings of my life. As with Scotch students, so with German burschen, Drummond, wherever he was known, was a universal favorite. He threw himself with his whole heart into the social life of the burschen, and was eagerly sought after by the German students for kneipes, for evening walks to the picturesque wirthschaften in the surrounding villages, and for holiday excursions to Lichtenstein, Hohenzollern, and the Schwarzwald. There were some dozen Scotch students in Tübingen that summer, and we all scored in the kindness accorded to us by the warm-hearted Teutons from our association with Herr Drummond. Not that Drummond impressed the German theologs with his intellectual power: he had a greater reputation as a consummate chess-player than as an expert in the New Testament criticism, for which Strauss, Baur, and Zeller had made Tübingen famous. It was his radiant personality that attracted the Germans, his perennial interestingness, the fascination of his manner, the charm of his character.
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND IN 1875. AGE 24 YEARS.
From a photograph by Fergus, Greenock, Scotland.
One of the chief features of the social life of the University of Tübingen, as of Heidelberg and other German universities, is the existence of different clubs, with their distinctive caps and sashes, their weekly reunions (kneipe) in a restaurant (wirthschaft), and their natural rivalries and jealousies. The chief gymnastic exercise of the German students is fechten (fencing with a long thin rapier), and the skill acquired in the gymnasium is turned to account in the settlement of quarrels between the clubs. Twenty-five years ago not a week passed without a rapier duel (forbidden, at least nominally, by the university and police authorities) taking place between representatives of clubs or between individuals, in the woods behind a quiet village wirthschaft. These duels, which were attended with no serious danger to life, interested Drummond for the insight they gave into the life and temperament of the burschen. Oftener than once his friends in the clubs let him into the secret of the time and place of a duel, and in after years his keen observation of the extraordinary skill of the combatants (or athletes, I should rather say) in attack and defense provided him with striking illustrations in addressing young men on their struggle with temptation.
His interest in the workings of human nature sometimes would show itself in forms original as droll. Three of us were walking along a quaint Tübingen street to the university lecture-room. "How easily," said one, "a crowd can be gathered." "Yes," said Drummond, "just let us stop at this grating in the pavement and bend down with an intent look." In a minute or two a crowd was round us; we passed out of it; as it still gazed at the grating and still increased in size, Drummond looked back with an amused smile on his demonstration of the ease with which a crowd can be gathered.
PROFESSOR DRUMMOND AND MR. MOODY.
During the New College session 1873-74, when Drummond was in his twenty-third year, came the turning-point in his career—the awakening of his intellectual life and the quickening of his spiritual enthusiasms. In the years when Drummond was at the university and the New College, there was a keen interest amongst the better students in the questions raised for debate between materialistic science and
