This opened the eyes of the mystical kinsmen to the fact that they had a genius among them, and the elder Hamilton was importuned for money to send the boy to Boston that he might receive a proper education and come back and own the store and be a magistrate and a great man.  No doubt the lad pressed the issue, too, for his ambition had already begun to ferment, as we find him writing to a friend, “I’ll risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.”

Most great things in America have to take their rise in Boston; so it seems meet that Alexander Hamilton, aged fifteen, a British subject, should first set foot on American soil at Long Wharf, Boston.  He took a ferry over to Cambridgeport and walked through the woods three miles to Harvard College.  Possibly he did not remain because his training in a bookish way had not been sufficient for him to enter, and possibly he did not like the Puritanic visage of the old professor who greeted him on the threshold of Massachusetts Hall; at any rate, he soon made his way to New Haven.  Yale suited him no better, and he took a boat for New York.

He had letters to several good clergymen in New York, and they proved wise and good counselors.  The boy was advised to take a course at the Grammar School at Elizabethtown, New Jersey.

There he remained a year, applying himself most vigorously, and the next Fall he knocked at the gate of King’s College.  It is called Columbia now, because kings in America went out of fashion, and all honors formerly paid to the king were turned over to Miss Columbia, Goddess of Freedom.

King’s College swung wide its doors for the swarthy little West Indian.  He was allowed to choose his own course, and every advantage of the university was offered him.  In a university, you get just all you are able to hold—­it depends upon yourself—­and at the last all men who are made at all are self-made.

Hamilton improved each passing moment as it flew; with the help of a tutor he threw himself into his work, gathering up knowledge with the quick perception and eager alertness of one from whom the good things of earth have been withheld.

Yet he lived well and spent his money as if there were plenty more where it came from; but he was never dissipated nor wasteful.

This was in the year Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, and the Colonies were in a state of political excitement.  Young Hamilton’s sympathies were all with the mother country.  He looked upon the Americans, for the most part, as a rude, crude and barbaric people, who should be very grateful for the protection of such an all-powerful country as England.  At his boarding-house and at school, he argued the question hotly, defending England’s right to tax her dependencies.

One fine day, one of his schoolmates put the question to him flatly:  “In case of war, on which side will you fight?” Hamilton answered, “On the side of England.”