* * * * *

While on the ship, Alexander had written to his father, asking for news of him and telling of the change in his own fortunes.  James Hamilton had replied at once, gratefully, but with melancholy; by this time he knew himself to be a failure, although he was now a planter in a small way.  Alexander’s letter, full of the hope and indomitable spirit of youth, interested as keenly as it saddened him.  He recalled his own high courage and expectant youth, and wondered if this boy had stronger mettle than his own equipment.  Then he remembered Rachael Levine and hoped.  He lived to see hope fulfilled beyond any achievement of his imagination, although the correspondence, brisk for a time, gradually subsided.  From Hugh Knox and Mrs. Mitchell Alexander heard constantly, and it is needless to state that his aunt kept him in linen which was the envy of his friends.  His beruffled shirts and lace stocks were marvels, and if he was an exquisite in dress all his life, it certainly was not due to after-thought.  Meanwhile, he lodged with the family of Hercules Mulligan, and wrote doggerel for their amusement in the evening.  Troup relates that Hamilton presented him with a manuscript of fugitive poetry, written at this period.  Mercifully, Troup lost it.  Hamilton has been peculiarly fortunate in this respect.  He lies more serenely in his grave than most great men.

When he was not studying, or joking, or rhyming, during those two short years of college life, he read:  Cudworth’s “Intellectual System,” Hobbes’s “Dialogues,” Bacon’s “Essays,” Plutarch’s “Morals,” Cicero’s “De Officiis,” Montaigne’s “Essays,” Rousseau’s “Emile,” Demosthenes’s “Orations,” Aristotle’s “Politics,” Ralt’s “Dictionary of Trade,” and the “Lex Mercatoria.”

He accomplished his mental feats by the—­to him—­simple practice of keeping one thing before his mind at a time, then relegating it uncompromisingly to the background; where, however, it was safe in the folds of his memory.  What would have sprained most minds merely stimulated his, and never affected his spirits nor his health, highly as nature had strung his nerves.  He was putting five years college work into two, but the effect was an expansion and strengthening of the forces in his brain; they never weakened for an instant.

XIV

In the spring of 1774 Hamilton visited Boston during a short holiday.  His glimpse of this city had been so brief that it had impressed his mind but as a thing of roofs and trees, a fantastic woodland amphitheatre, in whose depths men of large and solemn mien added daily to the sum of human discomfort.  He returned to see the important city of Boston, but with no overwhelming desire to come in closer contact with its forbidding inhabitants.  He quickly forgot the city in what those stern sour men had to tell him.  For to them he owed that revelation of the tragic justice