LIFE AT MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY -1857 -1864 253 



world, has also found a hero in the engine-driver, and 

 Kudyard Kipling will no doubt be followed by others. 



But my dreain of becoming a locomotive-driver faded, 

 and while in college I speculated not a little as to what, 

 after all, should be my profession. The idea of becoming 

 a clergyman had long since left my mind. The medical 

 profession had never attracted me. For the legal profes- 

 sion I sought to prepare myself somewhat, but as I saw it 

 practised by the vast majority of lawyers, it seemed a 

 waste of all that was best in human life. Politics were 

 from an early period repulsive to me, and, after my first 

 sight of Washington in its shabby, sleazy, dirty, unkempt 

 condition under the old slave oligarchy, political life be- 

 came absolutely repugnant to my tastes and desires. At 

 times a longing came over me to settle down in the coun- 

 try, to make an honest living from a farm a longing 

 which took its origin in a visit which I had made as a child 

 to the farm of an uncle who lived upon the shores of 

 Seneca Lake. He was a man of culture, who, by the aid 

 of a practical farmer and an income from other sources, 

 got along very well. His roomy, old-fashioned house, his 

 pleasant library, his grounds sloping to the lake, his 

 peach-orchard, which at my visit was filled with delicious 

 fruit, and the pleasant paths through the neighboring 

 woods captivated me, and for several years the agricul- 

 tural profession lingered in my visions as the most attrac- 

 tive of all. 



As I now look back to my early manhood, it seems that 

 my natural inclination should have been toward journal- 

 ism ; but although such a career proves attractive to many 

 of our best university-bred men now, it was not so then. 

 In those days men did not prepare for it; they drifted 

 Into it. I do not think that at my graduation there was 

 one out of the one hundred and eight members of my class 

 who had the slightest expectation of permanently connect- 

 ing himself with a newspaper. This seems all the more 

 singular since that class has since produced a large num- 

 ber of prominent journalists, and among these George 



