The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

f the upper buildings-which properly should have been called halls-was divided into five sections, in effect separate residences, each being under the custody of one of the profes

skylarking which resulted from the former often brought the section officer up, those who had any tact avoided too close an insistence on the regulati

d "South" halls and forming part of the architectural scheme of the institution, and here board was provided at somewhat lower terms than at the private boarding-houses in town, and of very much inferior quality. The price at the halls was, if I remember correctly, $1.25 a week for three meals a day, that in the town ranging from $1.50 to $1.75. Furnished rooms in the town cost 75 cents per week more, and a few favored or wealthier students had permission to room in them, but as a rule the undergraduates of Union were men of very limited means, on which account the president and founder o

of all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his position and profession,-that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in public opinion. He had attained his position by the force of his character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled in th

in political matters, with his old pupils. In the days of his activity, no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union. Seward was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics without the advice of the doctor. Having had a struggle with poverty in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily wi

itted unconditionally, as if he had come with the best of characters, and for a time he justified the confidence reposed in him. But the uneasy nature one day broke out, and he committed a gross violation of the rules. The discipline of the doctor began always with a friendly conversation, and with some men ended with it, for he knew so well how to paint the consequences of expulsion that it sufficed; but on the entry of this student into his library, he saw on looking at him that he "had the devil in his eye." He had, in fact, said to his roommate on getting the summons to the interview, "If the doctor thinks he is going to break me in he'll find himself mistaken." The doctor had a curious kind of vision which made it impossible to say which of the persons in the room he was looking at, and when, while seeming to be engaged on his book, he had looked into the eyes of the student, and saw that the light of battle was kindled in them, he waited for a little, and then, as if preoccupied

the advantages to be got out of the institution, and getting the indifferent through the course with the least discredit. In a state of society in which the collegiate standing was of importance to a man's career, this condition of things would have been a grave objection to the college, but in our western world the degree had very little importance, and the honors no effect on the future position. Most of the prominent m

e. Later he told me how he managed one of the worst early conflicts, in which the students on one side of the college road, and the town boys on the other, were arrayed in battle order, determined to fight out the question who were the better men. The doctor had early notice of the imminent row, and, fetching a circuit behind the "town," encouraged the boys on that side with assurances of his impartiality and even his satisfaction with a little punishment of the students, if they were aggressive. "But," said he, "don

egulation hours all through the sections; and, when his secret police had discovered the offenders, they were punished according to custom, never very severely, but sufficiently so to make them feel humiliated. But the mystery of his police was never explained, and we were always at a loss to conjecture how he discovered the most elaborately concea

morning. The next day he was greeted with such disorder that it was necessary to suspend the exercises, and one of the most violent demonstrators finished by throwing a huge wooden spoon at him, which, hitting him on the head, ended the row. His public examinations were the most severe we had to go through, and often quite needlessly so, in order to impress the visitors with his own knowledge rather than with ours, and as the end of a term drew near, I think in my last junior term, a conspiracy was got up to put him hors de comb

rous subservience to the authorities or informing against their fellow students. The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned. The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and the other was put through the keyhole of the door of the offender. In the body of the pipe was a bed of lighted charcoal, and on this was sprinkled tobacco and assafoetida, and the smoke was driven into the room in such quantities that no human being could resist it more than a few minutes.

usages of the college, that the doctor thought best to ignore the affair completely. The professor was completely cowed, and we had no more browbeating from him. But the practical jokes played on him were never attempted with any other member of the faculty, all of them having been trained in the doctor's own school. Except possibly the oldest of them, all were graduates at Union under him; and his system of elastic, unceasing pressure, constant and unobtr

ran more or less actively through the senior year, occupying largely the attention of the students. These societies were in general boyish imitations of the Freemasons, though the most eminent, the Phi Beta Kappa, was an old and dignified institution, having been founded in 1776, at William and Mary College, whence it soon spread to Harvard and Yale, eventually establishing itself in most of the principal colleges of the country; at Union, under the control of the faculty, it became the high literary distinction of the class, only the third of the class with the highest collective record being admitted at graduation. Each of the societies had its secrets, its secret meetings, its grip and passwords, and it always seemed to me, though I was early initiated into one

e in the juvenile schools, in answering questions taken from the lesson in standard textbooks, and called out no special abilities in the students which could distinguish the men of mark from the merest bookworms. There were men who never read the lesson and depended on being prompted by a friend. One of these derelicts, the son of a famous brewer, gave us a laugh which no member of the class can have forgotten. He wa

master of my future I should have been inclined to go back to the beginning and repeat the three years' course of study under the new light, and with a recognition of the purpose of higher study, for I saw that all that I had gained was little more than parrot learning. The doctor indeed tried to make us think, and he used to say that the textbook was a matter of entire indifference, and that he would as soon have a book of riddles as Kames's "Elements of Criticism," so long as he could make us think out our conclusions. With him our recitations were a perpetual contest of our wits against his; he showed us the shallowness of our acquisitions, and dissected mercilessly both textbook and the responses to the questions which he had drawn from it, admitting nothing and pushing th

elonged been organized with an episcopal government, he had certainly been its primate; but in the vague and incoherent condition of the Congregational churches, to one of which he belonged, there was no career beyond that of the isolated pastorate of a single congregation. In this insufficiency of interest for an active and influential life there was only the educational calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this he found hi

o my graduation, and on the election of Lincoln as President, I had used what influence I could enlist with the government (my brother being a prominent Republican) to get the appointment as consul to Venice, which was generally given to an artist, the principal petition in my favor went from Cambridge. It was written by Judge Gray (now on the Supreme Court bench), headed by Agassiz and signed by nearly every eminent literary or scientific man in Cambridge, but it lay at the Department of State more than six months, unnoticed. In the interim the war broke out and I

at revulsion from my previous straitened theological convictions was the cause of infinite perplexity and distress. Up to that time nothing had ever shaken me in my orthodox persuasions, and the necessity of concealing from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became

erior force of another mind-a persuasion of what seems to be truth as it is only seen by others' vision-could not hold its own against the early convictions, and that a revulsion to the old faith was sooner or later inevitable and generally healthy. The epidemic passed, and, though it gave me great distress for the time, it made my essential religious convictions stronger in the end. It is, I think, Max Müller who says that no man can escape from the environment of his early religious education. I have seen, in my experience of life and men, many curious proofs of that law, men who have lived for many years in the most abso

lum. I found her at home, a wretched shadow of her old self, listless, and in a settled melancholy, which the doctors said was incurable. She had in fact been discharged from the asylum as a hopeless lunatic, though the violent phase of the insanity had passed. It occurred to me that a diversion to old times would awaken her again to a sense of the present, and I tried to draw her back to the academy life by talking of it as if nothing had happened. That something unwonted was passing in her mind soon became evident, and finally she burst out with, "Why, Willie" (she had always so called me in the old times), "didn't you know I had been crazy?" The manner, the suddenness of the conflict between old associations and her present state, the mingling of our old affection, for I had in my boyhood held her very dear, as she had me, so overpowered me that I burst into tears, and she threw her arms around me and kissed me again and again. What the feeling which sprang up on her part was I could never quite understand,-doubtless it was partly the delight of a sudden relief from the old, monotonous pain, the unexpected unbending of a tense and overborne mind and momentary obliteration of the dreary immediate past, and partly the outburst of a passionate temperament which I had never suspected; but on my part there arose an attachment as chivalric as ever a knight of Arthur's time felt, yet perfectly platonic. That she was nearly old enoug

little sentimental, and her criticisms were so sound that in some respects they have never lost their effect on my way of thinking and expressing thought. She was persuaded to come to Schenectady and pass the period of my next vacation in our family. Her insanity absolutely disappeared, she returned to healthy activity in her old vocation as teacher, and the year after, to my great annoyance, married her former fiancé. I was angry with her, not for marrying, but for marrying him after his shameful treatment of her. She seemed to me, and to her family also, to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly unworthy any woman's devotion. All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted, and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal, the na?ve expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my sincerity offered mysel

only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and unsophist

eligious services in the city almshouse, a primitive institution which had no chaplain, and where were sent not only the incurably poor and the incurably sick, but the idiots and half-witted, as well as the temporarily incapacitated poor, who would have been, in a better and more complete social organization, sent to a hospital, which did not exist in Schenectady. With several other students and two or three young ladies of the city we held services at the "poorhouse" every Sunday. Short e

s held him in ill will; and as his garden bordered on our section, and his fowls roosted in the trees overhanging the green, we one day decided to mulct him in a supper. That night a party of the students of the section scaled the fence (I well remember tearing my trousers in climbing it) and wrung the necks of four of his fowls, which we sent into town next morning to be roasted, and which, accompanied by sundry mince-pies and a huge bowl of eggnog, made us a luxurious supper next midnight, the fragments being carefully-bones and bits of pie-crusts included-deposited at the professor's front door before daylight of next day, which happened to be Sunday. The package, carefully made up and directed like an express parcel, was addressed to him in all the fullness of formality, but it had rained in the interval, and when in the morning the servant took it up, on opening the door,

iterature enlisted all my ambitions, and the little weekly paper which was read at the meetings of our secret society occupied me more than was in due measure perhaps. I took my degree of course, but not with distinction. The majority of the famil