PREPARING FOR COLLEGE.
After nine months spent at Exeter Daniel was withdrawn by his father,
not from any dissatisfaction with the school or with the pupil’s
progress, but probably for economical reasons. Judge Webster was a poor
man, and though the charges at Exeter at that time were very moderate
they were a heavy draft upon the good father’s purse. But Dan was not
taken back to farm-work. He was allowed to continue his classical
studies, but under different auspices.
In the town of Boscawan, only six miles off, the minister, Rev. Samuel
Wood, was noted for his success in preparing boys for college. His
charges, too, were wonderfully low. For board and instruction he only
charged one dollar per week, which leads us to infer either that
provisions were very cheap, or that boys had less appetite than is the
case now. At any rate, the low price was a great inducement to Dan’s
father.
“Dan,” he said, soon after the boy came, “do you wish to continue your
studies?”
“Yes, father, if you are willing.”
“I am not only willing but desirous that you should do so. I intend to
place you with Rev. Mr. Wood, of Boscawen.”
Daniel knew of Mr. Wood’s reputation as a teacher, and the prospect did
not displease him.
Still his father had not announced the plan he had in view for him.
One cold winter day, when the snow lay deep on the ground, Judge
Webster and Dan started for the house of his future teacher. As they
were ascending a hill slowly through deep snows the Judge, who had for
some time been silent, said, “Dan, I may as well tell you what plan I
have in view for you. I shall ask Mr. Wood to prepare you for college,
and I will let you enter at Dartmouth as soon as you are ready.”
Daniel could not speak for emotion. He knew what a sacrifice it would
involve for his father with his straitened means to carry through such
a plan as that, and his heart was full. As he himself says, “A warm
glow ran all over me, and I laid my head on my father’s shoulder and
wept.”
I am afraid that some boys—possibly some of my young readers—have
received a similar announcement from their fathers with quite different
feelings.
We are to imagine Dan, then, an inmate of the minister’s family,
pursuing his studies with success, but with less of formal restraint
than when he was a pupil at Exeter. Indeed I shall not attempt
to conceal the fact that occasionally Dan’s love of sport, and
particularly of fishing, drew him away from his studies, and led him to
incur the good doctor’s remonstrances.
One day after a reprimand, which was tempered, however, by a compliment
to his natural abilities, Daniel determined to surprise his teacher.
The task assigned him to prepare was one hundred lines of Virgil, a
long lesson, as many boys would think. Daniel did not go to bed, but
spent all night in poring over his book.
The next day, when the hour for recitation came, Dan recited his lesson
with fluency and correctness.
“Very well,” said Dr. Wood, preparing to close the book.
“But, doctor, I have a few more lines that I can recite.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Wood, supposing that Dan might have read
twenty-five or thirty lines more. But the boy kept on till he had
completed a second hundred.
“Really, Dan, I compliment you on your industry,” said his teacher,
again about to close the book.
“But,” said Dan, “I have studied further.” “Very remarkable,” said the
minister in surprise; “well, let us have them.”
Dan rolled off another hundred lines, which he appeared to know quite
as well as the previous two hundred.
“You are a smart boy!” said the doctor approvingly, and not without a
feeling of relief, for it is rather tedious to listen critically to the
translation of three hundred lines.
“But,” said Dan, “I am not through yet.”
“Pray how much have you read?” asked Dr. Wood in amazement.
“I can recite five hundred more if you like,” said Dan, his eyes
twinkling with enjoyment at the doctor’s surprise.
“I think that will do for to-day,” said Dr. Wood. “I don’t think I
shall have time to hear them now. You may have the rest of the day for
pigeon shooting.”
Indeed Dan was always fond of sport, and not particularly fond of
farm-work. My boy reader may like to read an anecdote of this time,
which I will give in the very words in which Daniel told it to some
friends at a later day.
While at Dr. Wood’s, “my father sent for me in haying time to help
him, and put me into a field to turn hay, and left me. It was pretty
lonely there, and, after working some time, I found it very dull; and,
as I knew my father was gone away, I walked home, and asked my sister
Sally if she did not want to go and pick some whortleberries. She said
yes. So I went and got some horses, and put a side-saddle on one, and
we set off. We did not get home till it was pretty late, and I soon
went to bed. When my father came home he asked my mother where I was,
and what I had been about. She told him. The next morning when I awoke
I saw all the clothes I had brought from Dr. Wood’s tied up in a small
bundle again. When I saw my father he asked me how I liked haying. I
told him I found it ‘pretty dull and lonesome yesterday.’ ’Well,’ said
he, ‘I believe you may as well go back to Dr. Wood’s.’ So I took my
bundle under my arm, and on my way I met Thomas W. Thompson, a lawyer
in Salisbury; he laughed very heartily when he saw me. ‘So,’ said he,
’your farming is over, is it?’”
It will occur to my readers that, as Judge Webster was struggling so
earnestly to give Dan an education, it would have been more considerate
for the boy to have remained at his task, and so saved his father
the trouble of finishing it. However, it is not my intention to
present the boy as in all respects a model, though it is certain
that he appreciated and was thoroughly grateful for his father’s
self-sacrificing devotion.
On one occasion Dan was set to mowing. He did not succeed very well.
“What is the matter, Dan?” asked his father.
“My scythe does not _hang_ well,” answered Dan, an answer which will be
understood by country boys.
His father took the scythe and tried to remedy the difficulty, but when
it was handed back to Dan, it worked no better.
“I think you had better hang it to suit yourself, Dan,” said his father.
With a laughing face Dan hung it on the branch of a tree, and turning
to his father said, “There, that is just right.”
On another occasion Judge Webster, on returning home, questioned the
boys as to what they had been doing in his absence.
“What have you been doing, Ezekiel?” asked his father.
“Nothing, sir,” was the frank reply.
“And you, Daniel, what have you been doing?”
“_Helping Zeke, sir._”
There is no doubt that Judge Webster was more indulgent than was usual
in that day to his children, and more particularly to Daniel, of whose
talents he was proud, and of whose future distinction he may have had
in his mind some faint foreshadowing. This indulgence was increased
by Dan’s early delicacy of constitution. At any rate, Daniel had in
his father his best friend, not only kind but judicious, and perhaps
the eminence he afterwards attained was due in part to the judicious
management of the father, who earnestly sought to give him a good start
in life.
While at Boscawan Dan found another circulating library, and was able
to enlarge his reading and culture. Among the books which it contained
was an English translation of Don Quixote, and this seems to have had a
powerful fascination for the boy. “I began to read it,” he says in his
autobiography, “and it is literally true that I never closed my eyes
until I had finished it, nor did I lay it down, so great was the power
of this extraordinary book on my imagination.”
Meanwhile Daniel was making rapid progress in his classical studies.
He studied fitfully perhaps, but nevertheless rapidly. In the summer
of 1797, at the age of fifteen, he was pronounced ready to enter
college. His acquisitions were by no means extensive, for in those
days colleges were content with a scantier supply of preparatory
knowledge than now. In the ancient languages he had read the first six
books of Virgil’s Æneid, Cicero’s four Orations against Catiline, a
little Greek grammar, and the four Evangelists of the Greek Testament.
In mathematics he had some knowledge of arithmetic, but knew nothing
of algebra or geometry. He had read a considerable number of books,
however, enough to give him a literary taste, but he was by no means
a prodigy of learning. Yet, slender as were his acquirements, his
school life was at an end, and the doors of Dartmouth College opened to
receive its most distinguished son.