be easily imagined. The newly enfranchised blacks showed no inclination
for the groves of Academe, and not a single representative of the race
applied for matriculation. The outraged white population turned its back
upon this new type of coeducation; in the autumn of 1872 not a solitary
white boy made his appearance. The old university therefore closed its
doors for lack of students and for the next few years it became a
pitiable victim to the worst vices of the reconstruction era.
Politicians were awarded the presidency and the professorships as
political pap, and the resources of the place, in money and books, were
scattered to the wind. Page had therefore to find his education
elsewhere. The deep religious feelings of his family quickly settled
this point. The young man promptly betook himself to the backwoods of
North Carolina and knocked at the doors of Trinity College, a Methodist
Institution then located in Randolph County. Trinity has since changed
its abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the
largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in those days
a famous Methodist divine and journalist described it as "a college with
a few buildings that look like tobacco barns and a few teachers that
look as though they ought to be worming tobacco." Page spent something
more than a year at Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving
in December, 1872. A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely
more complimentary than the judgment passed above. They show that the
young man was very unhappy. One long letter to his mother is nothing but
a boyish diatribe against the place. "I do not care a horse apple for
Trinity's distinction," he writes, and then he gives the reasons for
this juvenile contempt. His first report, he says, will soon reach home;
he warns his mother that it will be unfavourable, and he explains that
this bad showing is the result of a deliberate plot. The boys who obtain
high marks, Page declares, secure them usually by cheating or through
the partisanship of the professors; a high grade therefore really means