A connection?

I just scoured the stacks for holdings by and about John Jay Chapman. He's well-represented here at Widener, with a multi-volume set of his complete published works and about a dozen or so books of his "greatest hits". One of his biographers mentions that in his second year as a Harvard undergraduate his father went bankrupt and the family's finances were in a state of shambles as a result. Only through the intervention of one of his professors and the generosity of his classmates was Chapman able to remain at school and continue his studies. In the biography the professor's identity is a mystery, but I wonder if it wasn't Old Sophie, as I've encountered a similar story in the reminiscences written about Sophocles that when a student found himself in dire financial straits and had no choice but to leave Harvard, the old Greek was so upset at the thought that he secured a loan for said student (who is anonymous on this side of the tale) from another undergraduate so that he could stay! Was the professor in the one story Sophocles and the student John Jay Chapman? I must find out!

Update: So the stories aren't quite as similar as I'd hoped. There was a financial crisis in the Chapman family, but it seems to have been resolved by John's Grandmother and some cousins in the Jay family. However, being that I don't remember the particulars of the situation with Sophocles' student in need, I'll have to wait until I can go back to the original lay of that story before pronouncing this interesting coincidence just that and nothing more. Still, I refuse to believe that Chapman had no interaction with Professor Sophocles at all during his time here. It's clear that he read Greek, and seeing that Old Sophie was the Eliot Professor of Greek at Harvard until his death in 1883, there's a window of three years during which they could have met. The problem with history, I'm finding, is that no one is ever asking the questions that you want answered, leaving you with no choice but to try and read between the lines and hope for a occasional overlap between someone else's pet mania and yours. Case in point is that excellent book by Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism, which touches on every aspect of Hellenism at Harvard in the 19th Century except for E. A. Sophocles. It's not that Old Sophie wasn't important - to the myriad students who learned Ancient Greek in his classroom, he was nothing less than seminal - but as a teacher first and a publisher and self-promoter second (if at all), he barely shows up on the radar unless you know to look for him. Of course, that's why I'm working on this book about him.