two or three young ladies of the city we held services at the “poorhouse” every Sunday.  Short exhortations with prayers and the singing of hymns composed the service, and I remember that one day, in giving out a hymn in long metre, I started it to a short metre tune, and had to go through it alone, the ladies whose business was the musical part of the service not being able to accommodate their measure to my leading.  I made my solo as short as possible, and finished with the ill-suppressed giggling of the girls, but my audience of poor cripples and weak-minded were equally impressed.

No doubt the struggles with Festus and my atheistic friend, and the partial influence of the ambient, the sincere piety of the old doctor, which dominated the life of the college, helped to strengthen the reaffirmation of my orthodox Christianity, and, for several years after, I had no more question of the divine authority of the tenets of our church, including the Seventh Day Sabbath, than I had of the laws of nature; but the truly spiritual character of my mother’s religion saved me from becoming a bigot.  If I had been trained in the dogmas of Christianity, I have no doubt I should have then become an atheist.  Nor was I a prig.  I must confess that I enjoyed the occasional larks in which my classmates sometimes led and sometimes followed me, as well as any of them.  Our Greek professor, Doctor R., was a bit of a snob, and the plebeians of the class, much the largest part, always held him in ill will; and as his garden bordered on our section, and his fowls roosted in the trees overhanging the green, we one day decided to mulct him in a supper.  That night a party of the students of the section scaled the fence (I well remember tearing my trousers in climbing it) and wrung the necks of four of his fowls, which we sent into town next morning to be roasted, and which, accompanied by sundry mince-pies and a huge bowl of eggnog, made us a luxurious supper next midnight, the fragments being carefully—­bones and bits of pie-crusts included—­deposited at the professor’s front door before daylight of next day, which happened to be Sunday.  The package, carefully made up and directed like an express parcel, was addressed to him in all the fullness of formality, but it had rained in the interval, and when in the morning the servant took it up, on opening the door, the wet paper broke and the remnants of the feast bestrewed the doorway.  The boy afterwards told me that the profanity of the professor was terrible to hear, and as he cut me two in my report of the Greek that term, I always suspected that he comprised me in the execration.  As it happened the cut was undeserved, for there were few men in the class who did their Greek better than I, and the cut cost me the Phi Beta Kappa, which went to all the class whose aggregate marks made an average per term of 981/2, mine being 981/4.  But as he always held me in disrespect on account of my father’s occupation, and as assiduously paid court and gave good reports to the sons of wealthy men, there was a mutual aversion.  He gave max. that term to the son of a famous quack doctor, who always came to me to be crammed for the recitation, while I got 98.  Naturally we had little respect for the marking.