Daniel Harwood had been graduated from Yale University a year before we
first observed him, and though the world lay before him where to choose,
he returned to his native state and gave himself to the study of law by
day and earned a livelihood by serving the "Courier" newspaper by night.
As Mr. Harwood is to appear frequently in this chronicle, it may be well
to summarize briefly the facts of his history. He was born on a farm in
Harrison County, and his aversion to farm life had been colored from
earliest childhood by the difficulties his father experienced in
wringing enough money out of eighty acres of land to buy food and
clothing and to pay taxes and interest on an insatiable mortgage held
somewhere by a ruthless life insurance company that seemed most
unreasonably insistent in its collections. Daniel had two older brothers
who, having satisfied their passion for enlightenment at the nearest
schoolhouse, meekly enlisted under their father in the task of fighting
the mortgage. Daniel, with a weaker hand and a better head, and with
vastly more enterprise, resolved to go to Yale. This seemed the most
fatuous, the most profane of ambitions. If college at all, why not the
State University, to support which the Harwood eighty acres were taxed;
but a college away off in Connecticut! There were no precedents for this
in Harrison County. No Harwood within the memory of man had ever
adventured farther into the unknown world than to the State Fair at
Indianapolis; and when it came to education, both the judge of the
Harrison County Circuit Court and the presiding elder of the district
had climbed to fame without other education than that afforded by the
common schools. Daniel's choice of Yale had been determined by the fact
that a professor in that institution had once addressed the county
teachers, and young Harwood had been greatly impressed by him. The Yale
professor was the first graduate of an Eastern university that Daniel
had ever seen, and he became the young Hoosier's ideal of elegance and