“Here came the turning-point in his life.  Mr. Bates, who taught the school, pleaded with him not to do so, and said that if he would continue in school till the next fall he could get a certificate.  I received a certificate about the same time The next year we went to the seminary at Chester, only twelve miles distant.  Here our books were furnished us, and we cooked our own victuals.  We lived upon a dollar a week each.  Our diet was strong, but very plain; mush and molasses, pork and potatoes.  Saturdays we took our axes, and went into the woods and cut cord-wood.  During vacations we labored in the harvest-field, or taught a district school, as we could.

“Yonder,” said he, pointing to a beautiful valley, about two miles distant, “stands the school-house where Garfield first taught school.  He got twelve dollars a month, and boarded round.  I also taught school in a neighboring town.  We both went back to Chester to college, and would probably have finished our education there, but it was a Baptist school, and they were constantly making flings at the children of the Disciples, and teaching sectarianism.  As the Disciples grew stronger they determined their children should not be subjected to such influence; the college of our own Church was established at Hiram, and there Garfield and I went.”

Though the remainder of the reminiscences somewhat anticipate the course of our story, it is perhaps as well to insert it here.

“We lodged in the basement most of the time, and boarded at the present Mrs. Garfield’s father’s house.  During our school-days here I nursed the late President through an attack of the measles which nearly ended his life.  He has often said, that, were it not for my attention, he could not have lived.  So you see that the General and myself were very close to one another from the time either of us could lisp until he became President.  Here is a picture we had taken together,” showing an old daguerreotype.  “It does not resemble either of us much now.  And yet they do say that we bore in our childhood, and still bear, a striking resemblance.  I am still a farmer, while he grew great and powerful.  He never permitted a suggestion, however, to be made in, my presence as to the difference in our paths of life.  He visited me here before election, and looked with gratification upon that pole yonder, and its flag, erected by his neighbors and kinsmen.  He wandered over the fields he had himself helped clear and pointed out to me trees from the limbs of which he had shot squirrel after squirrel, and beneath the branches of which he had played and worked in the years of his infancy and boyhood.

“I forgot to say that one of Gen. Garfield’s striking characteristics while he was growing up, was, that when he saw a boy in the class excel him in anything, he never gave up till he reached the same standard, and even went beyond it.  It got to be known that no scholar could be ahead of him.  Our association as men has been almost as close as that of our boyhood, though not as constant.  The General never forgot his neighbors or less fortunate kinsmen, and often visited us as we did him.”