GARFIELD AS A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.


When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown
boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position
of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, "In
seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that
boy will be the president," we can imagine their amazement.

Yet it had all come true. Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a
thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward
stride is made in so short a time.

After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of
a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion
when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become?"

For information upon this point, we go to one of his pupils, Rev. I.L.
Darsie, of Danbury, Conn., who writes as follows:

"I attended the Western Reserve Institute when Garfield was principal,
and I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me,
and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor, and was janitor of
the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as
he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil in the same
college. He was full of animal spirits, and used to run out on the green
every day and play cricket with his scholars. He was a tall, strong man,
but dreadfully awkward. Every now and then he would get a hit, and he
muffed his ball and lost his hat as a regular thing.[A] He was
left-handed, too, and that made him seem all the clumsier. But he was