which he managed to pay his way; and as he had to rise before five every
morning to ring the first bell, he was under no danger of oversleeping
himself. By 1853, he had made so much progress in his studies that he
was admitted as a sort of pupil teacher, giving instruction himself in
the English department and in rudimentary Greek and Latin, while he went
on with his own studies with the aid of the other teachers.

James had now learnt as much as the little "Eclectic Institute" could
possibly teach him, and he began to think of going to some better
college in the older-settled and more cultivated eastern states, where
he might get an education somewhat higher than was afforded him by the
raw "seminaries" and "academies" of his native Ohio. True, his own sect,
the "Disciples' Church," had got up a petty university of their own,
"Bethany College"--such self-styled colleges swarm all over the United
States; but James didn't much care for the idea of going to it. "I was
brought up among the Disciples," he said; "I have mixed chiefly among
them; I know little of other people; it will enlarge my views and give
me more liberal feelings if I try a college elsewhere, conducted
otherwise; if I see a little of the rest of the world." Moreover, those
were stirring times in the States. The slavery question was beginning to
come uppermost. The men of the free states in the north and west were
beginning to say among themselves that they would no longer tolerate
that terrible blot upon American freedom--the enslavement of four
million negroes in the cotton-growing south. James Garfield felt all his
soul stirred within him by this great national problem--the greatest
that any modern nation has ever had to solve for itself. Now, his own
sect, the Disciples, and their college, Bethany, were strongly tinctured
with a leaning in favour of slavery, which young James Garfield utterly
detested. So he made up his mind to having nothing to do with the
accursed thing, but to go east to some New England college, where he