54 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



proselyte any of his students. Yet the very atmosphere of the 

 school made sectarian bigotry and narrowness impossible." 



But the boy was destined for college, and was now sent to a 

 classical school, where Stoddard, the story writer, was among his 

 fellow-pupils, and where, though the methods in classical teaching 

 were imperfect, " the want in grammatical drill was more than 

 made up by the love of manliness and the dislike of meanness 

 which was in those days our very atmosphere." 



Outside the school his imagination had been stimulated by 

 desultory reading and by pictures of travel, and he had stumbled 

 upon the novels of Scott, to which above all was due the birth 

 of his interest in historical studies. The public meetings of the 

 time, especially those of the antislavery party, took also a deep 

 hold upon his mind. 



He had dreamed of entering one of the great New England 

 universities ; but the zealous young churchman into whose hands 

 he was put for his final training persuaded his father to send him 

 instead to the young and struggling Episcopal college at the neigh- 

 boring town of Geneva. There he matriculated in the fall of 1849. 

 With all his loyalty to his father's church and to his father's 

 wish, the college could not content him. Dependent on the wealthy 

 patrons whose sons it sought to educate, its discipline was lax 

 and its means too feeble for the work it undertook. " Only about 

 half a dozen of our number studied at all ; the rest, by transla- 

 tions, promptings, and evasions of various sorts, escaped without 

 labor." 



A year of this was all that he could stand, and when, at the 

 opening of another, his protest was still unheeded, he took French 

 leave of his reluctant alma mater and went into hiding at the 

 home of an old instructor until his father at last gave consent to 

 his transfer to Yale College. There he was admitted in January, 

 1851, to what has since become " the famous class of '53." But, 

 even among such classmates as Billings and Davies and Gibson 

 and Lewis and MacVeagh and Robinson and Shiras and Smalley 

 and Stedman, he soon won for himself a high place not so much 

 by his work in the classroom, though that was good, as by the 

 breadth of his information and of his sympathies, and by his 

 facility with pen and voice. He became an editor of the college 

 magazine, The Lit., and before his graduation won the first Clark, 

 the Yale Literary, and the De Forest prizes, the last for an essay 

 on The History of Modern Diplomacy. Nor were physical and 

 social claims neglected. He belonged to the earliest Yale crew, 

 and he became a member of Psi Upsilon and of the mystic Skull 

 and Bones, as well as of the more literary Linonia. His room- 

 mate and bosom friend was his classmate Davies, to-day Bishop 

 of Michigan. Of his college work, perhaps that which left the 



