been more harmless than they were here. The students, indeed, ignorant
of their own bliss, sometimes wished to hasten the time of their
entrance on the business of life; but they found, in after years, that
many of their happiest remembrances, many of the scenes which they would
with least reluctance live over again, referred to the seat of their
early studies."

* * * * *

He here divides the honors pleasantly between the forest-bred and
city-trained youth, having, from his own experience, an interest in each
class. Yet I think he must have sided, in fact, with the country boys.
Horatio Bridge, his classmate, and throughout life a more confidential
friend than Pierce, was brought up on his father's estate at Bridgton,
north of Sebago Lake; and Franklin Pierce, in the class above him, his
only other frequent companion, was a native of the New Hampshire
hill-lands. He himself, in his outward bearing, perhaps gathered to his
person something the look of both the seaport lads and the sturdy
mountaineers and woodsmen. He was large and strong (in a letter to his
uncle Robert, just before entering college, he gives the measure of his
foot, for some new shoes that are to be sent; it is ten inches), but an
interior and ruling grace removed all suspicion of heaviness. Being a
sea-captain's son, he would naturally make his connections at college
with men who had the out-of-doors glow about them; the simple and severe
life at Raymond, too, had put him in sympathy with the people rather
than with the patricians (although I see that the reminiscences of some
of the old dwellers near Raymond describe the widow and her brother
Richard as being exclusive and what was there thought "aristocratic").
Hawthorne, Pierce, and Bridge came together in the Athenaean Society,
the newer club of the two college literary unions, and the more