At this juncture came the brutal and as I felt most unmerited flogging of which I have told the story earlier: this precipitated a decision which had been slowly forming from my conscientious worries. I determined to go away from home, and seek a state of life in which I could maintain my spiritual tranquillity. I discussed the subject with a playmate of my age, the son of a gardener living near us, and, as his father had even a stronger propensity to the rod than mine, we sympathized on that ground and agreed to run away and work our passages on some ship to a land where we could live in a modified Robinson Crusoe manner,—not an uninhabited land, but one where we could earn, by fishing and similar devices, enough to live. I had been employed for a few months before in carrying to and fro the students' clothes for a washerwoman, one of the neighbors, and had earned three or four dollars which my mother had, as usual with any trifle I earned, put into the fund for the daily expenses. I do not know how it was with the older boys, but for me the rule was rigid—what I could earn was a part of the household income. I inwardly rebelled against this, but to no effect, so I never had any pocket-money. I submitted, as any son of my mother would have done at my age or have given a solid reason why not; but on this occasion, when money was indispensable to that expedition on which so much depended, I quietly reasserted my right to my earnings, and took the wages I had received, from the drawer where they were kept. My companion had no money at all, and thus my trifle had to pay for both as far as it would go,—fortunately, perhaps, as it shortened the duration of the expedition.
We went by train to Albany, where we took deck passage on a towing steamer for New York. The run was longer than that of a passenger steamer, so that the New York police who were warned to look out for us by the post, had given us up when we arrived and search was diverted in another direction. We arrived at New York with my funds already nearly exhausted by the food expenses en route, and my companion's courage had already given out—he was homesick and discouraged, and announced his determination to return home. My own courage, I can honestly say, had not failed me,—I was ready for hardship, but to go alone into a strange world damped my ascetic ardor and confounded all the plans I had made. I yielded, and with the last few "York shillings"[1] in my pocket bargained for a deck passage without board on a barge back to Albany. It was midsummer, and the sleeping on some bags of wool which formed the better part of the deck-load gave me no inconvenience, and the want of provisions of any sort was remedied as well as might be by a pile of salt codfish which was the other part of the deck-load, and which was the only food we had until our arrival at Albany, which we reached at night after a voyage of twenty-four hours. We slept under a boat overturned by the shore that night until the rising tide drove us out, when we decided to take the road back to Schenectady on foot, through a wide pine forest which occupied the intervening country, a distance of about sixteen miles. Passing on the way a stable in which there was nobody, not even a beast, we turned in to sleep away the darkness, and I remember very well what a yielding bed a manger filled with salt gave me. With the dawn we resumed the journey, and by the way ate our fill of whortleberries, with which the forest abounded.
[Footnote 1: 12½ cents each.]
The joy of my mother at our unhoped-for arrival—for she had received no news of us since our departure—is easily imagined, but for me the failure of all my plans for an ascetic and more spiritual life was made more bitter by the fact that the little octoroon, who had heard read the letter which I left for my mother, giving the motives for my self-exile, had repeated it to all the neighborhood, so that I not only had failed, but became the butt of the jokes of the boys of the neighborhood, who already held a pique against me for my serious ways and my habit of rebuking certain vices amongst them. I was jeered at as the boy "who left his mother to seek religion," and this made life for a time almost intolerable. But it was in part compensated for by the change in the situation in the household. It was clear that I had ceased to be the boy I used to be, and that I was to be taken seriously, and reasoned with rather than flogged. I had escaped from the pupa state of existence. But what I still look back to with surprise was my unflinching confidence in the future to which I committed myself in this escapade. I thought I was right, and that the aspiration for spiritual freedom, which was the chief motive of my leaving home, was certain to be supported by Providence, to whom I looked with serene complacence. If my companion had not deserted me I should not have turned back, but his defection destroyed all my plans. In several of my maturer ventures, I can recognize the same mental condition of serene indifference to danger while doing what I thought my duty, owing, perhaps, in a great measure to ignorance or incapacity to realize the danger, but also largely to ingrained confidence in an overruling Providence which took account of my steps and would carry me through.
CHAPTER III
AN AMERICAN EDUCATION
Whether on account of the escapade related in the preceding chapter or from influences of which I knew, and still know, nothing, it was decided not long after that I should go to New York to attend a public school there and live with my eldest brother, who, being twenty-five years older than myself, and childless, had always treated me with an indulgence which was perhaps due in part to the rigor of my father's rule, and in part to his fondness for me, of which I retain some early recollections in his annual visits home. My brother's wife, a fellow townswoman of ours, and a marriage-convert to the Seventh Day Baptist Church, was one of the most disagreeable persons I have ever had to deal with, and hysterical to a degree of occasional insanity. She had adopted the severities of our Puritanic system with aggravations. The Sabbath under her rule became a day of preatonement for the sins I was foreordained to commit. Dinner, as was the general custom in those days, was at noon, but on Saturday I had none till I had committed to heart and recited a portion of Scripture, and as the mental apathy of the period still weighed on me, the task of the Seventh Day was a sarcastic comment on the divine rest, in commemoration of which it was supposed to be instituted, and it made me grateful for the Sunday, which I generally passed in mechanical occupations in the workshop of my third brother, Paul, the foreman of the department in which the minor articles of the works were made, steam-gauges, models of inventions, etc., and as I had my share of the family manual dexterity, I found interest enough in the workshop. As my brothers always observed the Sabbath rigidly, they attracted around them a few of the New England mechanics who were "Sabbath-keepers" and mostly related to us, and so we had a small congregation and a church of our way of thinking.
The school to which I was sent was one of those founded by the Public School Society, a voluntary association of well-to-do citizens, who, in the absence of any municipal initiative, had organized themselves for the encouragement and support of primary education. As they were originally excluded from the management of the schools, the politicians, finding this a new field of operations and partisan activity, presently established the rival system of the municipal schools called "ward schools." At that time the political intrigues of the Catholic Church for the control of the public school system had just begun. The Public School Society had been organized for the free and non-sectarian education of all children unable to meet the expense of education in the private schools, and received subsidies from the municipality. Not only were all children under sixteen admitted to these schools without any fees, but the books, stationery, and all other material necessary were furnished gratuitously, and those who were shoeless were even provided with shoes, the only requisites being cleanliness and regular attendance. The direction was rigidly non-sectarian. The trustees were unpaid, and they comprised many of the leading citizens interested in popular education. They had built for their service sixteen schoolhouses in New York, and in each of these there were on an average a thousand children. The schoolhouses, of three stories, had a primary department for such children as were too young to be taught their letters or were not yet able to read and write, and to them the basement was given, the second story to the older girls, and the upper to the boys. The teaching for the boys' department was limited to the elements of arithmetic, elementary algebra, astronomy, and geometry, but within these limits the education was thorough, and all who went through it were qualified for places in offices or counting-rooms. The day was always opened by the reading of Scripture and prayer by the principal or one of the assistants, and this practice was made the ground of attack by the Catholic politicians, who objected to the Protestant Bible, all the school-books being already expurgated of every passage to which the bishops objected.
As our assistant principal was a Catholic, and often had to read the chapter, there could have been little harm done even to a Catholic pupil, but the political pressure was sufficient to induce the corporation of the city to adopt the political or "ward school" system, controlled by the politicians, and the new schools, one of which was or was to be established in each ward of the city, began to run an active opposition to the society schools, which they eventually drove out of existence.
At the time I was in the school, the interference of politics had just begun to make itself felt in the schools, but the corporation had not the courage to introduce its system on a large scale by supplanting en bloc the society schools, which might have made a political revolt; the Irish Catholic influence was still a feeble one, and the population at large was hardly aware of its tendency, but as the ward schools were gradually brought into active competition with the society schools the children were drawn off from the latter by various inducements and pressure on the parents. Each of our schools had four paid teachers—the principal, an assistant, and a junior and a senior monitor; and the elder pupils were employed in the instruction of the younger and in the preservation of order in school and in the school yard during the intermissions in which the gymnastics were enforced. My mental apathy must have been still very profound, for I remember that it often happened that when a question which had passed other pupils came to me in the class, the senior monitor used to address me, "Well, stupid, what do you say?" I evidently was the most stupid boy in the class—nothing seemed to penetrate my mental dullness, but, having grown tall and strong for my age, I was often made "yard monitor," to keep order during the physical training.
There was a gang of young ruffians, street boys, who used to hang around the school gates and maltreat the stragglers and even the boys in the yard, if the gate was left open, and I remember one day three or four of them invading the school-yard after I had dismissed the boys to go upstairs at the end of the intermission, thinking that they would have a fine game with the monitor. One made a pretext to quarrel with me, and, gripping me round the body, called to his companions to go and get some stones to pound me on the head with, this being the approved manner of the young roughs of New York. Finding that I could not extricate myself from his grip, I dragged him to the wall, and, catching him by the ears, beat his head against the rough stones until he dropped insensible, when, to the astonishment of his comrades, instead of stamping on him and finishing him at once, I ran upstairs as fast as my legs could carry me, so that when they came with their stones they had only their champion to carry out.
On the holidays there were generally stone-fights between the boys of our quarter and one of the adjoining quarters, and I shall carry to my grave the scars on my head of cuts received in one of these field combats, in which I refused to follow my party in flight, and took the onslaught of the whole vanguard of the enemy, armed with stones, and had my head pounded yellow, being only saved from worse by the intervention of the men of the vicinity. This fight gave me the unmerited reputation of courage and fighting power, and I was thereafter unmolested by the young roughs, though, in fact, I was timid to a degree and only stood my ground from nervous obstinacy; I never provoked a quarrel, and only revolted against a bully when the position became intolerable. I can remember the amazement of a companion older than myself, who had been in the habit of bullying me freely, until one day he went too far and I took him by the collar and shook and swung him till he was dizzy and begged for mercy, for of downright pugilistics I knew nothing, and a deliberate blow in the face with my fist in cold blood was a measure too brutal to enter into my mind.
The dreariness of this portion of my life was beyond description. The oppression of my sister-in-law at home, the severities of the teachers at school, and the exclusion from the influences of nature, in which I had so long lived without restraint, resulted in an attack of nostalgia which, when the coming of the first wildflowers brought it to a crisis, induced my brother to send me home.
My brother was attached to me, but the jealousy of his wife towards anybody who seemed to have any influence over him made it impossible for him to show any feeling even to me, for it brought on furious attacks of hysteria, to appease which he had sometimes to resort to humiliating devices. One day she became so excited that she fell into an extreme prostration and declared that she was dying. She had every indication, indeed, of approaching dissolution, and made her last dispositions, when my brother Charles, who was the family physician, seeing that the danger was real, assured her husband that unless some diversion of her humor was effected she would die. He advised exciting her jealousy, and her husband, accordingly, as if taking her dispositions for his conduct after her death, asked her what she thought of his marrying, in that contingency, a certain lady, whose name he mentioned, whereupon she rose in her bed in such a rage at the suggestion (the woman being her especial detestation) that she threw off all the symptoms of illness, and the next day went about the house as usual. This cure proved a grave misfortune to the whole family.
In spite of my aversion I was sent back to New York the next autumn for another winter's schooling. I landed from the steamer at the foot of Cortlandt Street two or three days after a great fire in New York, and I saw the ruins still smoking and the firemen playing on them. My baggage—a biscuit box, with my scanty wardrobe and a bag of hickory-nuts for my city cousins—I carried on my shoulders and walked the length of the city, my brother living in what was then farther New York, in Seventh Street, near the East River. At that time Fourteenth Street was the extreme limit of the city's growth, except for a few scattering residences. Beyond, and, on the East River side, even most of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land. I sailed my toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited. I discovered a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the discovery. Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as "diluvial scratches," which my brother Charles, who was an ardent naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality of the great deluge of Genesis. I think that we had to wait for Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook. At this time my brother was making conchology his special study, and many holidays we spent on the harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.
The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should go there to follow my studies in preparation for college. I was to "board out" a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a dormitory and a boarding-house. My uncle was to supply also my bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only covering, before he awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and bedding. But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there. The persistent apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift, and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to send me home as a disgrace to the family. I had taken up Latin again, algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote. I at length gave up exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were misery. I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness, and it seemed to me hopeless.
What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second term I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end, without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology. Unfortunately, the academy failed to meet the expenses, and at the end of my second term the students dispersed to their homes, I going with great regret, for I enjoyed intensely this life on the edge of a large natural forest, through which ran a trout brook, and in which such wild woodland creatures as still survived our civilization were tolerably abundant. Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated. I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,—almost girlish in his delicacy of temperament,—and showing the fine esprit which has made him one of the first of our humorists. His "Being a Boy" is a delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it be not so already.
Returning to Schenectady, I found that the family had begun to discuss the future of my career, which had arrived at the point of divergences. My father, who had no opinion of the utility of advanced education for boys in our station, was tenacious in his intention to have me in his workshop, where he needed more apprentices, but my mother was still more obstinate in hers that I should have the education; and in the decision the voices of my brothers were too potent not to hold the casting vote. In the stern, Puritanical manner of the family, I had been more or less the enfant gâté of all its members, except my brother Paul, the third of my brothers, who, coming into the knowledge of domestic affairs at the time when the family was at its greatest straits, had expressed himself bitterly at my birth, over the imprudence of our parents' increasing their obligations when they were unable to provide for the education of the children they had already, and had always retained for me a little of the bitterness of those days. On the whole, the vote of the family council was for the education. My own wishes were hardly consulted, for I differed from both opinions, having an intense enthusiasm for art, to which I wished to devote myself.
The collective decision, in which my father and myself were alike overruled, was that I should go to Union College, in Schenectady, as the collegiate education was supposed to be a facilitation for whatever occupation I might afterwards decide on. This was, so far as I was concerned, a fatal error, and one of a kind far too common in New England communities, where education is estimated by the extent of the ground it covers, without relation to the superstructure to be raised on it. I had always been a greedy reader of books, and especially of histories and the natural sciences,—everything in the vegetable or animal world fascinated me,—and I had no ambition for academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest—the years when, if ever, the artist is made.
That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism, as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the exercises of the college course. The consequences were the graver that I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander. I came out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist were past.
It was decided that I should continue my preparation for college in the Lyceum of my native town, a quaint octagonal building in which the students were seated in two tiers of stalls, the partitions between which were on radii drawn from a centre on the master's desk, so that nothing the pupil did escaped his supervision. The larger boys, some of whom were over sixteen, were in a basement similarly arranged with a single tier of desks, and I earned my instruction by supervising this room. I had here full authority so far as the maintenance of order was concerned and kept it, though some of the pupils were older than myself. I remember that one of them, about my own age and presumed strength, but himself convinced of his superiority, repeated some act which I had reprimanded him for, and as I knew that to allow it to pass unpunished was to put an end to my authority and position, yet did not feel competent or authorized to give him a regular flogging, I caught him by the collar and jerked him into the middle of the room, setting him down on the floor with force enough to bewilder him a little, and ordered him to sit there till I released him, and his surprise was such that he actually did not move till I told him to. I met no attempt to put my authority at defiance after that. A schoolfellow here and classmate in college was Chester A. Arthur, afterward President of the United States, a brilliant Hellenist, and one of the best scholars and thinkers in the class.
There were two associate principals at the head of the school, one for the classics, and the other for mathematics. Of the former I became a favorite on account of the facility with which I got on in his branches, and when the year was up I passed easily the examinations for entrance into college, and by his advice entered in the freshman year, though fairly well prepared to enter the sophomore with slight conditions. He was anxious that I should do him credit in college. But long before the term was out I found that the routine gave me hardly an occupation. I had already done all the mathematics of the year at De Ruyter, and the Latin and Greek came so easy that I found myself idle most of my time. I decided to try a fresh examination in order to gain a year by reëntering as a sophomore. The faculty declared such a thing unprecedented and inadmissible, to which I replied that I would then go to another college and enter, quite oblivious of the fact that I had neither the means nor the consent of my family to leave its protection and go to another city. The classical principal of the Lyceum, who was also a tutor in the college, did what he could to dissuade me, but I persisted and offered myself for examination, and found him on the examining committee. He was really fond of me, and in my own interest wanted me to go through college with honors, but this was to me of trivial importance, compared with the abbreviation by a year of the captivity of college life. He punished me by putting me to read for examination a passage of Juvenal, which I had never opened, as it did not come in the course even of the sophomores, but I passed fairly well on it, and he, with a little irritation, gave me the certificate, saying that it was not for what I did, but for what he knew me to be capable of. So, conditioned by some trivial supplementary examinations on subjects which I do not remember, I went up a class.
The constitution of Union College, like most of the American schools of the highest grade at that time, differed from that of the English model in some respects very widely. The "University" of Union was completed by collegated schools for medicine, divinity, law, and technical education. The medical and law schools of Union were at Albany, the capital of New York State. Our college buildings were three—one, West College, in the town, for the freshman and sophomore classes, and two on the hill above the town, North and South colleges, for the juniors and seniors. As a large proportion of the students were young men to whom the expenses of the education were a serious matter, many prepared themselves at home to enter the junior class, so that a class which only numbered a score as freshmen, often graduated a hundred. Others, again, used to spend the winter term and vacations in teaching in the rural or "district" schools to pay the expenses of the other terms, and the majority of the graduates were of these classes of men, often adults on entering, so that the class gathered seriousness as it went on.
The freshmen and sophomores, delegated to the care of the junior professors and tutors, indulged in many of the escapades of juvenility for which university life in most countries is distinguished, and were continually brought under the inflictions of college discipline, and now and then some one was expelled. The favorite tricks of getting a horse or cow into the recitation rooms, fastening the tutors in their rooms just before the class hours, tying up, or stealing, the bell which used to wake the students and call them to prayers or recitations, with rare and perilous excursions into the civic domain, or a fire alarm caused by setting fire to the outhouses, which always brought down on us the wrath of the firemen, varied the monotony of the student life, as everywhere else; but as I roomed at home for the first year I never had part in these escapades, and in my sophomore winter I took a district school in one of the valleys tributary to that of the Mohawk, in which the town lies.
The community in which the school was situated was almost exclusively composed of Scotch Cameronians, of whom several families were the descendants of a then still vigorous patriarch of the sternest type of that creed. It was necessary to pass a special examination to get the State certificate necessary to teach a district school, and this I had passed, but had still to undergo the questioning of the trustees of the district, canny and cautious beyond the common. The wages for such a school were twelve dollars a month and "board around," i.e. staying at the houses of the parents a week for each pupil in turn, beginning with those in best estate, so that, as the school had never less than twenty or thirty pupils, the poorer families were never called on. One of the boys intended to go to college, and his father was willing to pay a special contribution to secure a teacher of Latin, and this brought my wages up to sixteen dollars a month. But the cautious Scots urged a conditional engagement,—a trial of one month,—a condition which, as I might have anticipated, would end the engagement with the month, considering the composition of the district and the usual difference of views among the people. The two most advanced and oldest of the pupils belonged to families bound together by the most cordial jealousy which a petty community could inspire, and one of these was my Latin pupil. His rival was a lazy student and a turbulent scholar, with whom I had difficulties from insubordination from the beginning. As, however, I had adopted the rule of depending entirely on moral suasion in the government of the school and refused to flog, but instead offered prizes for good behavior and studiousness at my own expense for each week, my confidence in the better qualities of human nature betrayed me from the beginning. The prizes went to stimulate the jealousies between the two leaders, and the only punishment I would inflict, that of sending the pupil home for disobedience, made domestic difficulties.
The first week of the month I was boarded in the family of our patriarch, whose grandsons furnished a number of the pupils, and the life they led me was not one to make me regret the termination of the engagement. I was awaked while it was still night to join in family prayers, which were of a severity of which I had never dreamed. First a long selection of Psalms was read, then another long one sung, and then a prayer which, as I noticed by the clock, varied from ten to twelve minutes, through which, being still drowsy, I slept, being awakened by the family rising from their knees. This was the invariable routine gone through twice a day. As in our own family, with the exception of the Saturday morning family service, the devotions were always those of the closet, this tedium of godliness was a serious infliction. I was waked out of sound sleep, and bored through, before breakfast, by vain repetitions lasting on an average half an hour, after having endured the same for another half-hour before being allowed to go to bed. No escape was permitted even to the ill-willing, and it may easily be imagined that this addendum to the annoyances of my school hours made the position of the district schoolmaster one for which sixteen dollars a month was no compensation.
The conflicts in the school, if they gave me less tedium, were all the more acute. My Latin scholar was a lad who meant to profit by his opportunities and devoted himself to his studies, and, naturally, had a most cordial collaboration on my part, while the son of the rival citizen was both lazy and refractory, so that, with my system of inflicting no corporal punishments, he got none of the weekly prizes, and got such milder punishments as could be inflicted. To tell the truth, the pupils who were refractory to my system were few in proportion, and the school was a pleasanter place than if the rod had been always in hand, as in the days of my boyhood. But the month of trial did not elapse without signs of a storm brewing in the valley. My novel system of sparing the rod and spoiling the children could not fail to provoke the disapproval of the orthodox, and the head of the conspiracy was the father of my lazy schoolboy.
I left the valley for a visit home, on the last week of the month on Friday night, and started back on foot, a walk of fifteen or twenty miles, on Sunday afternoon, too late for convenience as I discovered in the event. That portion of the valley of the Mohawk, a broad and level plain, is bounded on the west by a range or ranges of hills divided by deep valleys running north and south, perpendicular to the course of the river, and in one of these valleys lay the township of Princeton, in the middle of which was the schoolhouse, the farms of the community being scattered over the hills around, and some of them at distances of a mile or two. It was the head of the glen, and the lay of the land was almost that of an amphitheatre, cannily chosen by the father of the colony, the old Cameronian whose prayers and long services grated so on my New England Puritanism. Before I turned out of the Mohawk valley into that of Princeton, the sun had set, with all the signs of a coming snowstorm, which broke on me suddenly in the glen with a furious north wind tearing down the gorge and drifting the snow as it fell, so that before I had gone a mile with the snow in my face, it was almost impossible to force my way against snow and wind. I wore a long Spanish cloak, such as was much in vogue then and there; wrapping my face in it so that only my eyes were free, I fought on, sometimes only able to walk backward from the cutting cold against my face and eyes, making very slow progress; but it was Sunday night, and the school must be opened at 9 A.M. on Monday. The snow gathered in drifts often up to my middle, with bare, wind-swept spaces between, and these drifts at times were crusted with wind-packed snow too hard to be waded through, and I was obliged to break the snow crust by throwing myself at full length on it. In this way I struggled on till ten at night, when I came to a solitary house by the roadside, at which I stopped to ask a night's lodging, for I could fight the weather no longer. The house was dark and the family asleep, but I was admitted. The bed given me was as cold as the snow outside, but it was luxury compared to some of the quarters I had in my school district. At one of the houses at which I had to take my turn, I remember that there had been, as an afterthought of the house architect, a door cut between the room I slept in and the farmyard, but, whether from indifference or inability, the door had never been put in, and a curtain which supplied its place and was intended to keep the snow out, did it so incompletely that I found in the morning—after a snowy night—that a heavy drift had formed between the opening and the bed. In this room, too, I shared the bed of the hired man, who was paid the same wages as mine, and in the eyes of the community was therefore in every way my equal.
On reaching the schoolhouse the next morning, I found gathered there not only a part of the scholars, but some of their parents,—including the trustees of the school,—and was not long in learning that my absence had been made use of by the disaffected of the district to depose me. We had a brief debate, not on the question whether I should go or not, but on the grounds of disaffection. The father of my lazy boy was, of course, the spokesman, and it seemed as if he resented his son's not being flogged, for want of discipline and partiality were the burden of his complaint. This gave me ample opportunity for a statement of my principles in instruction, and to say that his son was the laziest and most stupid boy in the school, and that instruction was wasted on him, and to contrast his progress and qualities with those of my Latin boy. It was malicious, I admit, but it was successful in infuriating the debate, and as I saw by the gathering that the majority had decided to avail themselves of the month's conditional engagement to dismiss me, I was quite indifferent to the discord I left behind me.
"It's all very fine for you," said my antagonist, whose Scotch I will not attempt to reproduce, "to sit up there on your desk and get your sixteen dollars a month, as if you were a hard-working man,"—to which I replied, "Perhaps you think you can come up here and earn it." As I was quite indifferent to the dismissal, and only did not avail myself of the privilege of going because I always had an obstinate way of sticking to a thing I had begun till it was finished, I made no attempt to conciliate, and it was with neither surprise nor serious annoyance that I received my notice of dismissal. The only things I had enjoyed, indeed, during the month, had been the walks through the dense forest from the farmhouses to the schoolhouse in the quiet sunshine of the winter mornings. The woods were more natural and older than those around my home, and there was a freshness in the early day which I never had realized so fully as in these morning walks to school, and I shall always remember the snowy silence of that forest, the first, on that scale, I had become familiar with.
But the poverty of the lives of these prosperous farmers was a revelation even to me, accustomed as I was to a domestic simplicity which would surprise modern Americans of any degree. New books were a luxury none of them indulged in; beyond the Bible and two or three volumes of general information, there was no reading except a weekly newspaper, and the diet was such as I had never been used to, even at De Ruyter. But for the vegetables of the farm, sailors at sea would fare better than these landsmen. In later years I boarded with one of the farmers in an adjoining valley, where I was engaged in painting a cascade of great beauty, and for the six weeks I lived in the family I saw only two articles of animal food—salt mackerel for breakfast and salt pork for dinner. The narrowness of intellectual range and the bigotry—political and religious—prevailing amongst them was such as I had in no experience ever encountered, even in the "straitest sect of the Pharisees," the Seventh Day Baptist Church of my youth. In the community in which I had grown, there was always the early influence of the sea to widen the range of thought and sympathy, but here, in the narrow valley to which the farmer was confined, neither nature nor religion seemed to have any liberating or liberalizing power. A sturdy independence was the dominant trait of character, but this independence was converted into a self-enslavement by the narrow range of thought which everywhere prevailed. The old Cameronian patriarch, in his sectarian exaltation, seemed almost a luminary in the intellectual twilight of that secluded community, and it was possible there to understand how even a narrow religious fanaticism could become an ennobling element in the character of a community living in such a restricted and materializing atmosphere. A few weeks in such a state of society enables one to understand better the irresistible attraction of cities and the life in the midst of multitudes to the rustic, born and raised in the back-water stagnation of a rural life like that of the farmers of my school district.
The remaining two months of the broken term of the college course and the better part of the vacation were spent in my father's workshop, where the work was rather pressing and the shop short-handed. My father's business was mainly the manufacture of certain mechanical implements for which he and his brother held the patents, and in the spring and autumn he was accustomed to carry the consignments of them to his customers in New York. His workshop was resorted to by several ingenious fellow New Englanders who had inventions to work out, and in the execution of these I was found useful. Among these was one Daniel Ball, whose specialty was locks, of which he invented, patented, and sold the patents of a new one every year, all worked out in my father's shop. Ball was a man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity and extraordinary profanity—of a savage temper, and very exclusive in his human sympathies; but he had a profound reverence for my father, of whom he used to say that "Old Joe Stillman was the only honest man God ever made," and I am inclined to think, looking back on a long life and wide experience in men of all classes and many nations, that Ball was justified in the esteem he held my father in, though admissibly wrong in his exclusiveness,—for I cannot recall, in all my memories of the old man, a single instance of his hesitating over the most trivial transaction in which a question of honesty was involved, and I have known him to relinquish his clear rights rather than to provoke a disagreement with a neighbor. He had a profound aversion to any ostentation of religious fervor, as had my mother. If he had lived to-day he would certainly have been an advanced evolutionist; even then his liberality in matters of doctrine and his unbounded charity towards all differences of opinion in religious questions used to cause my mother great anxiety as to his orthodoxy. He thought the fields and woods better places to pass the Sabbath in than a meeting-house, and this was a subject of great pain to her, the more that he developed the same feeling in me; but he never deferred in these matters to anybody, and never held a shade of that reverence for the clergy which was almost a passion in my mother's nature. While of an extreme tenderness of heart to all suffering or hardship outside the family, even towards animals, his domestic discipline was brutal and narrow. In the latter respect he was a survival of the old New England system; in the former, himself.
I had a parrot given me by one of my brothers returning from the Southern States, and the bird took an extravagant fondness for my father rather than for me. He was allowed to go free about the house and garden, and would go and sit on the fence when my father should be coming back from the workshop to dinner and supper, and run to meet his footstep long before he was in sight, chuckling and chattering with delight. Early one morning the parrot got shut, by chance, in the cupboard, and, attempting to gnaw his way out, was mistaken for a rat, and father took the shovel to kill him, while mother carefully opened the door so that the rat might squeeze his way out to be killed, but poor Poll got the blow instead, and had his neck broken. All that day my father stayed at home weeping for Polly, and no business misfortune in my recollection ever affected him as the death of the parrot did. He could flog me without mercy, but he could not see the suffering of a domestic or wild animal without tears, nor would he tolerate in us children the slightest tendency to cruelty to the least living thing.
I have alluded to the differences between him and my mother on the subject of education, the inutility of which, beyond a common-school standard, he made an article of faith, and the return to the workshop for the balance of the vacation, after my school-teaching failure, was the occasion of the final battle. As the vacation drew to an end, and the time which was still available for studying up the subjects of the last term, for the examination on reëntering, approached its imperative limit, I notified him that I must stop work. He said nothing until I had actually given it up and gone back to my study, about two weeks before the examination day. Coming home from the shop that day to dinner, in a very bad humor, he asked me why I had not been at work. I replied that I had barely the time absolutely necessary to make up my arrears of study to enter college for the next term. Then he broke out on me with a torrent of abuse as an idle, shirking boy, who only cared to avoid work, ending with the accusation that all I wanted was to "eat the bread of idleness," a phrase he was very fond of. I suppose I inherited some of his inequality of temper, and I replied by leaving the table, throwing my chair across the room as I did so; and, assuring him that when I ate another morsel of bread in his house he would know the reason why, I left the house in a towering rage. Having forewarned him days before that I must go, without his making the least objection, and having postponed the step to the latest possible moment, out of consideration for the work in hand, I considered this treatment as ungenerous, and was indignant.
I do not think that, weighing all the circumstances of the case, one could say that my father was entitled to impose his authority in a purely arbitrary interference with a matter in which the family council had decided on my course, and which involved all my future, or that my refusal to obey an irrational command implies any disrespect to him. At all events, I decided at once that I would not yield in this matter, and I made my preparations to seek another home, even with a modification in my career. If I must abandon the liberal education, I would not waste my life in a little workshop with three workmen, and no opportunity to widen the sphere of activity, or opening into a larger occupation. If I should be obliged to leave the college, it should be for something in the direction of art, and in this light I did not much regret the change. I had not, however, calculated on my mother's tenacity, or the imperceptible domination she exercised over my father.
When I returned to the house to get my clothes and make my preparations for leaving home for good, I had a most painful scene with my mother, and it was the only serious misunderstanding I ever had with her. She went through, in a rapid résumé, the history of my life, from the day when I was given her in consolation for the little brother before me, who died, with a word for each of the crises through which her care had carried me,—accidents, grave maladies, for I was apparently not a strong child, and at several conjunctures my life had been despaired of; all the story being told as she walked up and down rapidly in the chamber, with the tears running down her cheeks, and with a passionate vehemence I had never suspected her to be capable of, since she had the most complete self-restraint I ever knew in a woman. But it was an impasse—I neither could nor would go back from the career decided upon, nor would the family have consented, and to return to the workshop at my father's insistence was to lose everything. It seemed brutal to refuse mother's entreaties to ignore the collision of wills, and to go on as if nothing had happened, but to do this and remain in the house with my father, in the perpetual danger of another conflict, was impossible. The question had to be settled, and all I could do was to insist on father's making a distinct disavowal of any right or intention to demand my services in the shop at any future time, and leaving me free to follow the programme agreed on in the family council. It was in effect a frank apology that I wanted, but I knew him too well to suppose he would ever consent to make an apology in words, or to admit to me that he had made a mistake; and I left the solution in my mother's hands, with the understanding that the definite promise should be made to her, and I knew too that this would hold him as completely as if made to a public authority. Nothing could bring her to contradict him openly, and in all my life I never saw her make a sign of disrespect for his mastery in domestic things, but I knew that once this promise was made to her I could count on his being held to it sternly.
That evening the matter was settled, but of what had passed, or what was said, I never knew anything, for my mother never wasted words; and, while no apology was made, or any retraction expressed, neither my father nor myself ever alluded to the subject of my working in the shop again, nor did I ever, as before, go into it during the vacations, or offer to assist when affairs were hurried. The habit of asserting the paternal authority and the sense of it, in my father, were so strong that I never risked again reviving it.
CHAPTER IV
COLLEGE LIFE
I passed my examination and resumed my place in the class, but I never tried district school-teaching again. Entering upon my junior year I had a room in the north college. Each of the upper buildings—which properly should have been called halls—was divided into five sections, in effect separate residences, each being under the custody of one of the professors or tutors, who was responsible for order in the same, the two end sections of each of the colleges being an official residence for one of the senior professors with families. The rule required the students to be in their rooms after supper, but it was almost as much honored in the breach as in the observance, and, though the skylarking which resulted from the former often brought the section officer up, those who had any tact avoided too close an insistence on the regulations, so that the students in the same sections commonly visited each other in the evenings, and not infrequently those from the other sections came in.
Our quarters were of the simplest,—one room for two students, with one wide bed,—and there we lived and studied. At half-past five the bell rang to wake us, and half an hour later for prayers, the sleepy ones returning to sleep after the waking bell, and thrusting themselves into their clothes as they ran when the prayer-bell rang, to get to prayers before the roll-call was over. From prayers again we dispersed to the recitation rooms for the morning recitations, and then to breakfast, mostly in town. There were two boarding-houses, one at each end of the college walk, known as "North" and "South" halls and forming part of the architectural scheme of the institution, and here board was provided at somewhat lower terms than at the private boarding-houses in town, and of very much inferior quality. The price at the halls was, if I remember correctly, $1.25 a week for three meals a day, that in the town ranging from $1.50 to $1.75. Furnished rooms in the town cost 75 cents per week more, and a few favored or wealthier students had permission to room in them, but as a rule the undergraduates of Union were men of very limited means, on which account the president and founder of the college, Dr. Nott, had planned its regulations to facilitate the attendance of that class of students, and the rules were such as closely to restrict the students from any participation in the social life of the towns-people. The visits of the section officers to the rooms of the students were irregular, and the inquisition into the causes of absence so thorough, that few, not of the most reckless, cared to risk a visit to the town, half a mile from the upper buildings; and the old doctor's police was too good for men to escape detection in any serious indulgence in irregular hours.
Union was, at this epoch, and during the active life of the doctor, the third university of the United States, coming, in the general estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale, Harvard being then, as always, the first; and it owed its character and peculiar reputation to the strong and singular personality of its first president. I have, in the course of my life, become more or less acquainted with many able men, and Dr. Nott was the most remarkable of all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his position and profession,—that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in public opinion. He had attained his position by the force of his character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled in the character of society. The manual of public speakers which we used to draw on for the speeches in class recitations included, as one of the most brilliant examples, the doctor's oration on the death of Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, one of the earliest and the most prominent of the demagogues of America. I have not read the oration for fifty years; but, as I remember it, it was, in the fashion of the day, one of the most eloquent of all our readings.
As I was a favorite of the doctor in the last year of my course and for years after, and as no one has ever in my estimation done him justice, it is to me a debt of gratitude, as well as a matter of justice, to repair as best I may this neglect. No one but a pupil could ever have fairly estimated his force of character, and no pupil whose intercourse with him was not carried into the post-graduate years could measure the ability with which he advised, especially in political matters, with his old pupils. In the days of his activity, no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union. Seward was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics without the advice of the doctor. Having had a struggle with poverty in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily with the poorer students, and a practical education was more easily gained at Union than was then possible at Yale or Harvard. Men were allowed to defer payment of the fees till later life when their means had increased; and, though there were no scholarships, there were many students whose burdens were so far alleviated by the regulations that an earnest man who was determined to take his degree and work his way if he must, needed never leave college unsatisfied.
The doctor's reading of character and detective powers were barely short of the miraculous, and his management of refractory students became so well known that many who had been expelled from the other universities were sent to Union and graduated with credit, so that the college acquired the nickname of "Botany Bay." There came to him once for admission a student expelled from Yale for persistent violation of the regulations, and naturally without the letter which by general usage was required from the president of one university to another, certifying the good standing of the student. The president of Yale wrote to the doctor to ask "if he meant to take that scoundrel into his college." The doctor, who had made a rapid examination of the man, replied, "Yes, and make a man of him." In one of my post-graduate years, when I was staying with the doctor, he told me the story of this man. He had estimated his character at a glance correctly, and saw in him a mismanaged student. He was admitted unconditionally, as if he had come with the best of characters, and for a time he justified the confidence reposed in him. But the uneasy nature one day broke out, and he committed a gross violation of the rules. The discipline of the doctor began always with a friendly conversation, and with some men ended with it, for he knew so well how to paint the consequences of expulsion that it sufficed; but on the entry of this student into his library, he saw on looking at him that he "had the devil in his eye." He had, in fact, said to his roommate on getting the summons to the interview, "If the doctor thinks he is going to break me in he'll find himself mistaken." The doctor had a curious kind of vision which made it impossible to say which of the persons in the room he was looking at, and when, while seeming to be engaged on his book, he had looked into the eyes of the student, and saw that the light of battle was kindled in them, he waited for a little, and then, as if preoccupied, said to him in his most kindly tone, "I am very much occupied at this moment, my son; won't you come in to-morrow evening?" The young man went back to his room already half conquered by the affectionate manner, but the important point gained in the doctor's tactics was that the psychological moment of combat in the student had been reached and could not be kept up for a day, and when on the next evening the interview took place, his combativeness had given place to perplexity and complete demoralization. In this state the doctor gave him a paternal lesson on the consequences to his future life of the rebellion against necessary discipline and of persistent disorderly conduct, but without any actual reproof or mention of his offense, and all in his invariably kindly tone as if it were a talk on generalities, and then dismissed him to think it over. He had established cordial relations with the rebel, and from that day had no trouble with him, and he graduated at the head of his class.
And the doctor understood men so well that he never wasted his trouble on those who had nothing in them, but let them drift through the course unnoted. Expulsions were very rare, and the secret police of the university was so competent that the almost absolute certainty of detection generally deterred the men from serious infractions of the rules. The government seemed to be based on the policy of giving an earnest man all the advantages to be got out of the institution, and getting the indifferent through the course with the least discredit. In a state of society in which the collegiate standing was of importance to a man's career, this condition of things would have been a grave objection to the college, but in our western world the degree had very little importance, and the honors no effect on the future position. Most of the prominent men of our past had not even been through any university, and in politics it was often rather an obstacle than a recommendation that a man was a "college man." What the doctor tried to do, then, was to make a man when he found the material for one, and to ignore the futile intellects. This was the scheme of the education at Union when I was there, and it rarely failed to find the best men in the class and bring them forward.
Our college life may have been to the men of sufficient means more largely supplied with the elements of excitement, but for the poorer students there was little romance in it. Now and then a demonstration against an unpopular professor, a "bolt," i.e. abstention en masse from a recitation; or a rarer invasion of the town and hostile demonstration gave us a fillip, but the doctor had so well policed the college and so completely brought under his moral influence the town, that no serious row ever took place in my time. Later he told me how he managed one of the worst early conflicts, in which the students on one side of the college road, and the town boys on the other, were arrayed in battle order, determined to fight out the question who were the better men. The doctor had early notice of the imminent row, and, fetching a circuit behind the "town," encouraged the boys on that side with assurances of his impartiality and even his satisfaction with a little punishment of the students, if they were aggressive. "But," said he, "don't begin the fight and put yourselves in the wrong. If my boys come over, thrash them well, but let them strike the first blow." Having put them in the strongest defensive attitude, believing that they had the doctor with them, he went round to the students and applied the same inducements to the defensive, leaving them under the persuasion that he entirely approved their fighting, and then he went home and left them to their conclusions. As time passed and neither took the offensive, they all cooled off and went home.
The tact with which he dealt with the occasional outbreaks in the college was very interesting. If it was a case of wanton defiance of the habitual order, there was a very slight probability of its being overlooked. A favorite prank of the stealing of the college bell was invariably punished, first by having a hand-bell rung a little earlier than regulation hours all through the sections; and, when his secret police had discovered the offenders, they were punished according to custom, never very severely, but sufficiently so to make them feel humiliated. But the mystery of his police was never explained, and we were always at a loss to conjecture how he discovered the most elaborately concealed combinations, so that suddenly, even weeks after, when the culprits thought they had finally escaped detection, he would announce at prayers that they were to come to his study to explain. If the outbreak, however, had been in any way justified by an arbitrary or unwise act of discipline by any of the professors, he used to ignore it altogether.
The professor of mensuration, a fussy and consequential little fellow, a volunteer on the staff, and a man of singularly slight knowledge of young men, very fond of showing his authority, especially at the public examinations at the end of the term, had incurred the wrath of the class and become the butt of all its practical jokes. Having boasted one evening in society of the town that the students dared not rebel against him, and the boast coming to their knowledge, not a single student presented himself at the recitation next morning. The next day he was greeted with such disorder that it was necessary to suspend the exercises, and one of the most violent demonstrators finished by throwing a huge wooden spoon at him, which, hitting him on the head, ended the row. His public examinations were the most severe we had to go through, and often quite needlessly so, in order to impress the visitors with his own knowledge rather than with ours, and as the end of a term drew near, I think in my last junior term, a conspiracy was got up to put him hors de combat for that examination. It was decided to take him out of his room in the section (he was section officer in my own section) and bring him into the pine woods in the rear of the college, and there, unless he solemnly promised to stay away from his class examination, to cut off his hair and tar his head first, then crop his beard, and, if he was still refractory, to strip him (it was midsummer) and tie him to a tree and leave him all night, under the conviction that he would not show himself at examination after that experience.
In the small hours, the conspirators, provided with a duplicate key to the professor's door, made a stealthy attempt to open it, but found his key on the inside and were unable to open the door, but woke the victim, who, however, dared not raise an alarm. One of the smaller students tried to climb in through the ventilator, but this was nailed down, and then as a last resort the "smoking machine" was brought into action. This was an "infernal machine," employed in hazing students who had in any way offended the opinion of the class, especially by indecorous subservience to the authorities or informing against their fellow students. The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned. The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and the other was put through the keyhole of the door of the offender. In the body of the pipe was a bed of lighted charcoal, and on this was sprinkled tobacco and assafoetida, and the smoke was driven into the room in such quantities that no human being could resist it more than a few minutes. The smoking was continued for ten minutes, when, as the professor did not surrender, it began to be feared that the joke had gone too far, and two of the conspirators went out to see if there were any external signs of vitality, and found that the victim had opened his window and was lying with his head below the window-sill so as to be out of the smoke which poured out over him. I suppose that the delegates were drunk, for one of them threw a block of wood at the professor's head which, missing him, drove in the window pane and finished the experiment.
It was the gravest outrage of my time, and had there not been so large a part of the senior class implicated in the conspiracy, directly or indirectly, there is no doubt that the doctor would have taken the most severe measures for the punishment of those concerned. No partial punishment would have been possible, and the general irritation against that particular professor was so great in the class, and his course had been so little in conformity with the usages of the college, that the doctor thought best to ignore the affair completely. The professor was completely cowed, and we had no more browbeating from him. But the practical jokes played on him were never attempted with any other member of the faculty, all of them having been trained in the doctor's own school. Except possibly the oldest of them, all were graduates at Union under him; and his system of elastic, unceasing pressure, constant and unobtrusive surveillance, and simple appeals to the students' higher interests and manly feeling were so generally potent in the government of the college that the petty tyranny of the mensuration professor, nicknamed "Geodesy," found no support in the faculty, though the same elastic system which threw the responsibility of final results on the individual left him the same freedom of action which it gave us, and he had to learn his lesson while he taught us ours.
The students mostly joined one or other of a large number of secret societies, mainly social and never scholastic, which had, almost without exception, originated at Union, spreading to other universities by migration or initiation of their members. The distinction most sought for by ambitious students, the marshalship of the "commencement" ceremonies,—i.e. the conferring of degrees, speech-making, etc., of the graduating class,—was an elective office and voted for by all the members of the class, so that, for this position of a day, scholarship was only of secondary importance, the personal popularity of the candidates determining the election. The societies grouped themselves in two parties, the most popular man in each party was its candidate, and the canvassing ran more or less actively through the senior year, occupying largely the attention of the students. These societies were in general boyish imitations of the Freemasons, though the most eminent, the Phi Beta Kappa, was an old and dignified institution, having been founded in 1776, at William and Mary College, whence it soon spread to Harvard and Yale, eventually establishing itself in most of the principal colleges of the country; at Union, under the control of the faculty, it became the high literary distinction of the class, only the third of the class with the highest collective record being admitted at graduation. Each of the societies had its secrets, its secret meetings, its grip and passwords, and it always seemed to me, though I was early initiated into one which had a distinguished record and literary reputation, that it was a folly and a waste of the energies of the students. Opposed to them all was an anti-secret society, and this, like the others, was known by the initials of the secret name, which was supposed to be Greek and to indicate, mysteriously, the character of the society. Students at the earliest date, generally in the first weeks of attendance, were thoroughly canvassed by the members of these societies, and invited, in accordance with their characters, to enter one or the other, those of a studious tendency finding most favor with that to which I was invited, and which consisted mostly of poor and studious men, others according to their social standing or wealth, or even their tendency to a wild life.
Besides this we had a house of representatives for the juniors and a senate for the seniors, over which two of the senior professors presided, knowing the rules of the respective branches of Congress, and requiring their observance in the debates, which echoed the grave political questions of the day. There was no lecturing system, and there was no such thing known as coaching; and the recitations consisted, like those in the juvenile schools, in answering questions taken from the lesson in standard textbooks, and called out no special abilities in the students which could distinguish the men of mark from the merest bookworms. There were men who never read the lesson and depended on being prompted by a friend. One of these derelicts, the son of a famous brewer, gave us a laugh which no member of the class can have forgotten. He was known for drinking enormous quantities of his father's beer and sleeping even in class; and when the question put him was, "Who was the reputed inventor of poetry amongst the Greeks?" he had no answer till the man behind him whispered, "Orpheus." He caught it badly, and roared, "Morpheus." The laugh that followed stopped recitation for ten minutes. A laugh in a large class had a curious way of going on indefinitely.
Until we reached the senior year, and came under the direct care of the old doctor, there was nothing in the course to awaken special ambitions. The honors, determined chiefly by the marks given at the end of the term, being mainly the reward of a diligence rather stupid than otherwise, as a rule were regarded with great indifference, and, for the most part, fell to the men who "poled" most assiduously, and got the best marks for attention, diligence, and correct recitation of the set tasks. As I look back on the life and work of that period, it seems to me that it was most unintelligently spent, and when I reached my senior year, and came under the direct stimulus of Dr. Nott, I recognized that, so far as the true education was concerned, I had wasted two years, and had I been master of my future I should have been inclined to go back to the beginning and repeat the three years' course of study under the new light, and with a recognition of the purpose of higher study, for I saw that all that I had gained was little more than parrot learning. The doctor indeed tried to make us think, and he used to say that the textbook was a matter of entire indifference, and that he would as soon have a book of riddles as Kames's "Elements of Criticism," so long as he could make us think out our conclusions. With him our recitations were a perpetual contest of our wits against his; he showed us the shallowness of our acquisitions, and dissected mercilessly both textbook and the responses to the questions which he had drawn from it, admitting nothing and pushing the pupil perpetually into the deeper water as soon as he began to think his foot had touched firm land. The first term under the doctor brought up every intellectual faculty I possessed, and I suppose it was to this intense appreciation of his leading that I owed his friendship and partiality in the following years. So far as the influence of school can go, I owe to him the best of my education, and especially the perception of the meaning of the word itself. In the senior year I turned back in my life and sought not to hasten, but to linger in the precincts of study, and the imperious necessity of getting to the only occupation which would give me the independence I desired, alone deterred me from a post-graduate course of study to compensate for the inadequacy of the past years.
In entering the church, Dr. Nott had deprived the world of a statesman of no ordinary calibre, but in the eyes of the Protestant, as of the Catholic Church, in the country which had its precedents to make, as in that which had precedents a thousand years old, the maxim, "once a priest always a priest," kept him in the pulpit, to which he had no irresistible call, and to which the accident of his career only had led him. Had the church to which he belonged been organized with an episcopal government, he had certainly been its primate; but in the vague and incoherent condition of the Congregational churches, to one of which he belonged, there was no career beyond that of the isolated pastorate of a single congregation. In this insufficiency of interest for an active and influential life there was only the educational calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of young men of his generation.
Nobody could know him except the pupils to whom he disclosed himself, and to whom his kindly and magnanimous nature was unreservedly open, and they were few, and the list is fast being canceled; when we are gone, no one will ever comprehend how he could have been what he was. But the power he always exercised over his favorite boys was extraordinary; any of us would have done anything permitted to human nature to satisfy his wish. An instance of his influence, occurring later in my life, will illustrate his power over his old pupils. When, several years subsequent to my graduation, and on the election of Lincoln as President, I had used what influence I could enlist with the government (my brother being a prominent Republican) to get the appointment as consul to Venice, which was generally given to an artist, the principal petition in my favor went from Cambridge. It was written by Judge Gray (now on the Supreme Court bench), headed by Agassiz and signed by nearly every eminent literary or scientific man in Cambridge, but it lay at the Department of State more than six months, unnoticed. In the interim the war broke out and I had gone home from Paris, where I was then living, to volunteer in the army; but, being excluded by the medical requirements, and the ranks being full,—800,000 volunteers being then enrolled,—I turned to my project for Venice, and wrote a word to Dr. Nott, recalling his promise of years before to use his influence in my favor, if ever it were needed. He inclosed my letter, with one containing an indorsement of it, and sent it to Seward, the Secretary of State, and the appointment—not to Venice, which had just been given to Howells, but to Rome—came by return of post.
Union was then the only university of importance not under some form of denominational control, and for this reason had, perhaps, more than the usual share of extreme liberalism, or atheism, as it was at that time considered amongst the students; and one of my classmates, a man a couple of years older than myself, and of far more than the average intellectual power, made an active propaganda of the most advanced opinions. He also introduced Philip James Bailey's "Festus" to our attention, and for a time I was carried away by both. The great revulsion from my previous straitened theological convictions was the cause of infinite perplexity and distress. Up to that time nothing had ever shaken me in my orthodox persuasions, and the necessity of concealing from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition of immortality,—or, if the term intuition be denied me, the conviction that immortality was the foundation of human existence, grounded in my earliest thoughts, and as clear as the sense of light,—and this never failed me. In this respect Swedenborg helped my reason in its struggle, though I could never see my way to the entire acceptance of his doctrine.