BOYHOOD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK-1832-1850 17 



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

 greatly enjoyed. His "Biglow Papers " 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 "help" and " hired man" 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 



