career at Yale.  He was as unobtrusive as possible.  “Silent as the Sphinx,” some describe him.  His sensitive nature withdrew into itself, and since he could not mingle with his classmates on a ground of equality, he kept to himself, alone, silent, studying, working, but telling no one how keenly he felt the difference between his own position and that of his fellow students.  He worked for the nearby farmers as at Wilbraham and did anything that he could to earn money.  But his clothes were poor, his manner of living the cheapest, and except in classes, his fellow students met him little.

He took the law course and followed fully the classical course at the same time—­a feat no student at that time had ever done and few, if any, since.  How he managed it, working as hard as he did at the same time, to earn money, seems impossible to comprehend.  His iron constitution, for one thing, that seemed capable of standing any strain, helped him.  And his remarkable ability to photograph whole pages of his text books on his memory was another powerful ally.  He could reel off page after page of Virgil, Homer, Blackstone—­anything he “memorized” in this unusual fashion.  Well for him that he grasped the opportunity to learn this method presented him as a child.  But it has always been one of the traits of his character to see opportunities where others walk right over them, and to seize and make use of them.

He did not register in the classical course as he was too poor to pay the tuition fee, nor did he join any of the clubs, as he could not afford it.  He seldom appeared in debates or the moot courts, for he was so shabbily dressed he felt he would not be welcome.  It was undoubtedly these humiliating experiences, combined with certain of his studies and reading, that caused him to drift into an atheistic train of thought.  Working hard, living poor, desiring so much, yet on all sides he saw boys with all the opportunities he longed for, utterly indifferent to them.  He saw boys spending in riotous dissipation the money that would have meant so much to him.  He saw them recklessly squandering health, time, priceless educational opportunities, for the veriest froth of pleasure.  He saw them sowing the wind, yet to his inexperienced eyes not reaping the whirlwind, but faring far more prosperously than he who worked and studied hard and yet had not what they threw so lightly away.  It was all at variance with his mother’s teaching, with such of the preaching at the little white church as he had heard.  Bible promises, as he interpreted them, were not fulfilled.  So he scoffed, cynically, bitterly, and said, as many another has done before he has learned the lessons of the world’s hard school, “There is no God.”  And having said it, he took rather a pride in it and said it openly, boastingly.

As at Wilbraham, funds ran out before the school year was completed and he left Yale and taught district school during the day and vocal and instrumental music in the evenings.