comparative comfort in an Eastern city. But he could not finish his college course, and he would have to sever the ties with friends in Ohio and with the struggling school at Hiram, to which he was deeply attached. He settled the question in a conversation. Walking on a hill, called Mount Olympus, with the gentleman who had made the proposition, Garfield said to him:

"You are not Satan, and I am not Jesus, but we are upon the mountain, and you have tempted me powerfully. I think I must say, get thee behind me. I am poor, and the salary would soon pay my debts and place me in a position of independence; but there are two objections. I could not accomplish my resolution to complete a college course, and should be crippled intellectually for life. Then my roots are all fixed in Ohio, where people know me and I know them, and this transplanting might not succeed as well in the long run as to go back home and work for smaller pay."

Study at Williams was easy for Garfield. He had been used to much harder work at Hiram, where he had crowded a six years' course into three, and taught at the same time. Now he had the stimulus of a large class, an advantage he had never enjoyed before. His lessons were always perfectly learned. Professor Chadbourne says he was "the boy who never flunked," and he found a good deal of time for courses of reading that involved as much brainwork as the college textbooks. He graduated August, 1856, with a class honor established by President Hopkins and

highly esteemed in the college-that of Metaphysics-reading an essay on "The Seen and the Unseen." It is singular how at different times in the course of his education he was thought to have a special aptitude for some single line of intellectual work, and how at a later period his talents seemed to lay just as strongly in some other line. At one time it was mathematics, at another the classics, at another rhetoric, and finally he excelled in metaphysics. The truth was that he had a remarkably vigorous and well-rounded brain, capable of doing effective work in any direction his will might dictate. The class of 1856 contained among its forty-two members a number of men who have since won distinction. Three became general officers in the volunteer army during the rebellion-Garfield, Daviess and Thompson. Two, Bolter and Shattuck, were captains, and were killed in battle; Eldridge, who now lives in Chicago, was a colonel; so was Ferris Jacobs, of Delhi, N. Y.; Rockwell is a quartermaster in the regular army; Gilfillan is Treasurer of the United States. Hill was Assistant Attorney-General and is now a lawyer in Boston. Knox is a leading lawyer in New York. Newcombe is a professor in the New York University, of New York.

During his last term at Williams he made his first political speech, an address before a meeting gathered in one of the class-rooms to support the nomination of John C. Fremont. Although he

had passed his majority nearly four years before, he had never voted. The old parties did not interest him; he believed them both corrupted with the sin of slavery; but when a new party arose to combat the designs of the slave power it enlisted his earnest sympathies. His mind was free from all bias concerning the parties and statesmen of the past, and could equally admire Clay or Jackson, Webster or Benton,

CHAPTER VII.

A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.

J

AMES A. GARFIELD left the venerable dome of Williams decorated with her high towers

and went straight back to his Ohio home, to take a higher step in his hard won career. He entered Hiram College in the fall of 1856 as a teacher of ancient languages and literature. The next year, at the age of twenty-six, he was made president of the institution. This office he held until he went into the army in 1861. Hoping that he might return-unwilling to part even with his name-the board kept him nominally at the head two years longer. Then he fell out of the catalogue, to re-appear as a trustee and as advisory principal and lecturer in 1864 and 1865. Then his name finally disappears from the faculty page of the catalogue. His last service as an instructor was an admirable series of ten lectures on "Social Science," given in the spring of 1871.

Hiram, when he returned to it, had not much improved since two years before. It was a lonesome country village, three miles from a railroad, built upon a high hill, overlooking twenty miles of cheese-making country to the southward. It contained fifty or sixty houses clustered around the

green, in the centre of which stood the homely red-brick college structure. Plain living and high thinking was the order of things in those days. The teachers were poor, the pupils were poor, and the institution was poor, but there was a great deal of hard, faithful study done, and many courageous plans formed.

The young president was ambitious for the success of the institution under his charge. There probably never was a younger college president, but he carried his new position remarkably well, and brought to it energy, vigor and good sense, which are the mainsprings of his character. Under his supervision, the attendance on the school at Hiram soon doubled, and he raised its standard of scholarship, strengthened its faculty, and inspired everybody connected with it with something of his own zeal and enthusiasm. At that time the leading Hiram men were called Philomatheans, from the society to which they belonged. Henry James, an old Philomathean, mentioning recently the master-spirits of that time, thus referred to the president:

"Then began to grow up in me an admiration and love for Garfield that has never abated, and the like of which I have never known. A bow of recognition, or a single word from him, was to me an inspiration."

The young president taught, lectured and preached, and all the time studied as diligently