Though a part of his time was taken up in teaching others, he did not allow it to delay his own progress.  Still before him he kept the bright beacon of a college education.  He had put his hand to the plow, and he was not one to turn back or loiter on the way.  That term he began Xenophon’s Anabasis, and was fortunate enough to find a home in the president’s family.

But he was not content with working in term-time.  When the summer brought a vacation, he felt that it was too long a time to be lost.  He induced ten students to join him, and hired Professor Dunshee to give them lessons for one month.  During that time he read the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil entire, and the first six books of Homer’s Iliad, accompanied by a thorough drill in the Latin and Greek grammar.  He must have “toiled terribly,” and could have had few moments for recreation.  When the fall term commenced, in company with Miss Almeda Booth, a mature young lady of remarkable intellect, and some other students, he formed a Translation society, which occupied itself with the Book of Romans, of course in the Greek version.  During the succeeding winter he read the whole of “Demosthenes on the Crown.”

The mental activity of the young man (he was now twenty) seems exhaustless.  All this time he took an active part in a literary society composed of some of his fellow-students.  He had already become an easy, fluent, and forcible speaker—­a very necessary qualification for the great work of his life.

“Oh, I suppose he had a talent for it,” some of my young readers may say.

Probably he had; indeed, it is certain that he had, but it may encourage them to learn that he found difficulties at the start.  When a student at Geauga, he made his first public speech.  It was a six minutes’ oration at the annual exhibition, delivered in connection with a literary society to which he belonged.  He records in a diary kept at the time that he “was very much scared,” and “very glad of a short curtain across the platform that hid my shaking legs from the audience.”  Such experiences are not uncommon in the career of men afterward noted for their ease in public speaking.  I can recall such, and so doubtless can any man of academic or college training.  I wish to impress upon my young reader that Garfield was indebted for what he became to earnest work.

While upon the subject of public speaking I am naturally led to speak of young Garfield’s religious associations.  His mind has already been impressed with the importance of the religious element, and he felt that no life would be complete without it.  He had joined the Church of the Disciples, the same to which his uncle belonged, and was baptized in a little stream that runs into the Chagrin River.  The creed of this class of religious believers is one likely to commend itself in most respects to the general company of Christians; but as this volume is designed to steer clear of sect or party, I do not hold any further reference to it necessary.  What concerns us more is, that young Garfield, in accordance with the liberal usages of the Disciples, was invited on frequent occasions to officiate as a lay preacher in the absence of the regular pastor of the Church of the Disciples at Hiram.