afford to be married; and so Lucretia Rudolph became Mrs. Garfield—­a name loved and honored, for her sake as well as his, throughout the length and breadth of our land.  She, too, had been busily and usefully employed in these intervening years.  As Mr. Philo Chamberlain, of Cleveland, has told us elsewhere, she has been a useful and efficient teacher in one of the public schools of that city.  She has not been content with instructing others, but in her hours of leisure has pursued a private course of study, by which her mind has been broadened and deepened.  If some prophetic instinct had acquainted her with the high position which the future had in store for her, she could have taken no fitter course to prepare herself to fulfil with credit the duties which, twenty years after, were to devolve upon her as the wife of the Chief Magistrate of the Union.

This was the wife that Garfield selected, and he found her indeed a helper and a sympathizer in all his sorrows and joys.  She has proved equal to any position to which the rising fame of her husband lifted her.  Less than a year ago her husband said of her:  “I have been wonderfully blessed in the discretion of my wife.  She is one of the coolest and best-balanced women I ever saw.  She is unstampedable.  There has not been one solitary instance in my public career when I suffered in the smallest degree for any remark she ever made.  It would have been perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be misinterpreted; but, without any design, and with the intelligence and coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that I ever heard of.  With the competition that has been against me, such discretion has been a real blessing.”

Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands.  But as James A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and sympathetic companion and helpmeet.

They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the college campus; and so their wedded life began.  It was a modest home, but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted.  As President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of Hiram College, to his family.  Greatness has its penalties, and a low estate its compensations.

CHAPTER XIX.

GARFIELD AS A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.

When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, “In seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that boy will be the president,” we can imagine their amazement.