BOYHOOD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK-1832-1850 17 



was my reading of Lowell s Poems, many of which I 

 greatly enjoyed. His &quot;Biglow Papers &quot; were a perpetual 

 delight; the dialect was familiar to me since, in the lit 

 tle New England town transplanted into the heart of 

 central New York, in which I was born, the less educated 

 people used it, and the dry and droll Yankee expres 

 sions of our &quot;help&quot; and &quot;hired man&quot; were a source of 

 constant amusement in the family. 



In my seventeenth year came a trial. My father had 

 taken a leading part in establishing a parish school for 

 St. Paul s church in Syracuse, in accordance with the 

 High Church views of our rector, Dr. Gregory, and there 

 was finally called to the mastership a young candidate 

 for orders, a brilliant scholar and charming man, who has 

 since become an eminent bishop of the Protestant Epis 

 copal Church. To him was intrusted my final prepara 

 tion for college. I had always intended to enter one 

 of the larger New England universities, but my teacher 

 was naturally in favor of his Alma Mater, and the influ 

 ence of our bishop, Dr. de Lancey, being also thrown 

 powerfully into the scale, my father insisted on placing 

 me at a small Protestant Episcopal college in western 

 New York. I went most reluctantly. There were in the 

 faculty several excellent men, one of whom afterward 

 became a colleague of my own in Cornell University, and 

 proved of the greatest value to it. Unfortunately, we of 

 the lower college classes could have very little instruc 

 tion from him; still there was good instruction from 

 others; the tutor in Greek, James Morrison Clarke, was 

 one of the best scholars I have ever known. 



It was in the autumn of 1849 that I went into residence 

 at the little college and was assigned a very unprepos 

 sessing room in a very ugly barrack. Entering my new 

 quarters I soon discovered about me various cabalistic 

 signs, some of them evidently made by heating large iron 

 keys, and pressing them against the woodwork. On 

 inquiring I found that the room had been occupied some 

 years before by no less a personage than Philip Spencer, 



I.-2 



