Court of New York City — said to him, "I have a remarkable boy-student in my office only fourteen years of age, of whom we shall both hear much, if his assiduities do not injure his health." Both did hear the ' much '; and while the preceptor did not live to realize the full extent of his pre diction, Judge Vanderpoel lived to hear from his own Bench many arguments made by the boy grown to manhood, — the finished briefs of which are scattered through the volumes of Sandford's reports — and also to marry his son to the daughter of Mr. Noyes, upon whose library table reverently lies a volume scrap-book filled with elegiac corre spondence and newspaper or magazine notices that commemorate proceedings of associations, clubs and societies taken upon her father's decease. Young Noyes soon took studentship in offices of larger practice, and with better li braries — notably with counsellors Fowler and Storrs. One of these preceptors remarked the excessive passion that his student dis played for books, and the avidity with which he would pore over treatises far beyond his apparent comprehension. His apprentice ship lasted the customary seven years, at the end whereof he passed examination be fore the Supreme Court at Albany, and began practice at Rome, a midland town of his native State; and next removed to Utica, — named after the "pent-up" town of poetic fame. That growing but infant city could not, however, " contract his powers," and soon he determined to remove to New York, where, together with a senior member of the Utica Bar, — William Tracy, afterwards a commissioner in a third revision of the State Statutes, — he formed a partnership. It may not be invidious to state that when these new comers joined the Metropolitan Bar, it included greater professors of legal science and practice than that Bar has since possessed, and that the Bench (which then confronted the Bar) included more renowned jurists than the New York courts have since
then known. Nevertheless, almost imme diately, Mr. Noyes invited attention and enlisted clients. His physique and manner were attractive, and his perseverance and readiness in performance of labor were no table. During his novitiate he had suffered from ophthalmia, accidentally contracted from using a towel which, unknown to him, had been in the keeping of one so infected. For a long time thereafter he entirely lost the use of his eyes, and was compelled to call upon some one among his nine younger brothers and sisters to supply his enfeebled vision in* the matter of reading and writing. In after life he often re marked, " Ah, those dreary months passed in the darkened room quickened my thought, my power of analysis, exercised my mem ory, and brought a mental discipline that, all in all, has compensated in the end for my apparent misfortune and suffering." " I fancy,"" he remarked to a friend upon one occasion, "that my love for the Miltonian poetry was somewhat traceable to my sym pathy for the malady which afflicted Milton and that I so well understood." Fortunately, — but Mr. Noyes, rigid Presbyterian and exemplary Christian in thought and action that from youth he ever was, would have used in such a connection the word "provi dentially,"— however, his ophthalmia in after years left only occasional weakness of vision, and did not dim the extreme beauty of his expressive blue eyes, nor eclipse their soft, amiable light in repose, or power of visual gesture when he became interested in con versation or argument. I have seldom be held franker eyes, or eyes that glowed with more transparent truthfulness. They were, indeed, of his soul, what Tennyson has termed eyes, their very windows. The truthfulness of Mr. Noyes became proverb ial with Bar and Bench. " I can bring an affidavit from Mr. Noyes as to what tran spired at the reference in question," once remarked an attorney, in addressing that great jurist, Judge John Duer, upon a mo
