first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read
a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to
mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in
recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin
scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens,
were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a
collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he
especially mentions Rees's Cyclopaedia--such was the wealth of a boy of
genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain
that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing
somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by
sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those
destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes
on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took
the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory
of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel."
His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days,
for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only
the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his
studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor,
and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his
expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was
evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes
seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting,
patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he
went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes.

Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at
college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley,
forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one