The Three Faces of Meade

Y OUTH and middle-ager, I have known David Meade Feild for nigh-on thirty years. But since my first encounter with him in 1939 at Mercer University-as one of his naive freshman law students -my aggregate daily association with him has been a mere three years. Even this all-too-short span has been fragmented by events into three very different time and experience phases. My impressions of Professor Feild and his impact on me bring to mind a fabled phenomenon of human observation and reporting aptly described by a former col- league: The process is remindful of [three] blind men feeling the various parts of the elephant and reporting their disparate impressions.

To the listener, the elephant becomes, in turn, a rope, a wall, a tree .