"God Almighty Hates a Quitter"                    15

It was good to see Miss Mudge in her home. Though arthritis
has cramped her movements more than she and her friends would
wish, and though she has to use "that thing" in order effectively
to carry on conversation, the years have been kind to her. It is
hard to believe that she has been retired for more than ten years;
her eye is as bright and her mind as eager and questing as when she
presided over the central reading room under the dome of the old
Low Memorial Library. As we sat in her livingroom, talk flowed
rapidly. It went by natural degrees back to a great teacher who
had been a decisive factor in the intellectual development of
both of us, Professor George L. Burr of Cornell University, under
whom she had studied in the last decade of the nineteenth century
while I had worked with him in the early years of the twentieth.
It was our common enthusiasm for him that constituted the bond
that drew us together when I came to Columbia in 1915. We
talked about his scholarship and his teaching, his insistence that
students should present the evidence for their statements of pre¬
sumed historical fact, and failing such evidence should remain
silent. He had no patience with those who insisted upon "ex¬
pressing themselves" on the basis of no verified knowledge. It
was through his teaching, Miss Mudge avers, that she first sensed
the importance of getting back to the sources of knowledge and
received early introduction to the problem of seeking those
sources through reference guides. This, she said, constituted the
start of her career as a reference librarian. We recalled that in his
preoccupation with the search for all the evidence, and in his in¬
sistence upon imparting to his students his own enthusiasm for
painstaking research. Professor Burr had written relatively httle,
and the question arose whether a great teacher projects himself
into the future more fundamentally through his immediate per¬
sonal contact with his students or through the books which he
writes. The question probably has no answer, but we were agreed
that Professor Burr, and indeed any great teacher, would live long
through successive generations of students, fired by those who had
received their original inspiration from him. It might have been