From Farm Boy to Senator. Alger Horatio Jr.
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.
CHAPTER VII.
DANIEL’S COLLEGE LIFE
It is all important point in a boy’s life when he enters college. He leaves home, in most cases, and, to a greater extent than ever before, he is trusted to order his own life and rely upon his own judgment. It is a trying ordeal, and many fail to pass through it creditably. A student who has plenty of money is in greater danger of wasting his time from the enlarged opportunities of enjoyment which money can buy. From this danger, at least, Daniel was free. His father found it hard enough to pay his ordinary expenses, and it is hardly likely that the boy ever had much spare money to spend on pleasure.
Besides, though only fifteen, Daniel already possessed a gravity and earnestness not often to be found in much older students. These, however, were blended with a humor and love of fun which contributed to make him an agreeable companion for his fellow-students.
Daniel’s development was not rapid. The oak tree grows steadily, but in rapidity of growth it is eclipsed by many trees of less importance. The great powers which our hero exhibited in after life did not at once make themselves manifest. He did not at once take his place proudly at the head of his class. This is shown by the fact that at the Sophomore exhibition neither of the two principal appointments was assigned to