case, I have always felt that I owed an immense debt of gratitude to 

 Whig Hall, of which all the men of my family, back to my Great- 

 grandfather, had been members, though Jerseymen were mostly Clios. 

 That the modern undergraduate no longer has the same vigorous and 

 inspiring experiences that the Halls gave us, is his undoubted loss. 



The Class of 1877 entered about one hundred strong; our studies were 

 all prescribed, and our classroom work was in mathematics and lan- 

 guages, ancient and modern. The School of Science opened its doors in 

 September 1873, but as the course was then but three years long, the 

 first Class was that of '76. It was a great handicap to me that I continued 

 to live in my Grandfather's house, so far away from the campus, and 

 that I was only fifteen years old. Not that I was the youngest of the class 

 — several members were junior to me — but I had never been at a board- 

 ing school and was like a fish out of water in so large a class. The handi- 

 cap of extreme youth turned out, in the long run, to be a great advan- 

 tage, for it gave me a remarkably early start and brought me back to 

 Princeton at a very unusual conjunction of affairs, when the way was 

 open to rapid promotion. In addition to the handicaps of my situation, 

 there were the disadvantages due to my own personal peculiarities. 



On a preceding page I pointed out that I had had to pay a high price 

 for the great privilege of growing up in my Grandfather's family. Part 

 of this price was that I was never really young, owing to my lack of play- 

 mates and constant association with grown people. I loved many forms 

 of outdoor sport, but as a man loves them, and the sort of thing that 

 amuses and interests most boys had no attractions for me. I was green 

 enough and bumptious enough. Heaven knows, but it was in the want 

 of experience, not in the point of view. From the spoiling and petting 

 of that big family, of which I was the youngest member, I had gained 

 a very inflated idea of my own cleverness and importance and, with it, 

 a positive, dogmatic way of talking that has clung to me all my life and 

 has often caused me the greatest mortification. This unfortunate habit 

 I have never been able to break, just because it is a habit, of which I 

 am entirely unconscious, until I learn that I have given offence unwit- 

 tingly. 



Though much younger in years, in experience and in knowledge of 

 my fellows than most of my classmates, I was, in many ways, far older 

 than they and was unable to sympathize with, or even to comprehend, 

 their point of view. They brought to college the schoolboy habit of mind, 

 especially in the matter of distrust and suspicion of their teachers, whom 

 they regarded as in a perpetual conspiracy to play some unseemly trick 



[34] 



