entered the State University at Chapel Hill; it had been a great headquarters in ante-bellum days for the prosperous families of the South.  But by the time that Page was ready to go to college the University had fallen upon evil days.  The forces which then ruled the state, acting in accordance with the new principles of racial equality, had opened the doors of this, one of the most aristocratic of Southern institutions, to Negroes.  The consequences may be easily imagined.  The newly enfranchised blacks showed no inclination for the groves of Academe, and not a single representative of the race applied for matriculation.  The outraged white population turned its back upon this new type of coeducation; in the autumn of 1872 not a solitary white boy made his appearance.  The old university therefore closed its doors for lack of students and for the next few years it became a pitiable victim to the worst vices of the reconstruction era.  Politicians were awarded the presidency and the professorships as political pap, and the resources of the place, in money and books, were scattered to the wind.  Page had therefore to find his education elsewhere.  The deep religious feelings of his family quickly settled this point.  The young man promptly betook himself to the backwoods of North Carolina and knocked at the doors of Trinity College, a Methodist Institution then located in Randolph County.  Trinity has since changed its abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in those days a famous Methodist divine and journalist described it as “a college with a few buildings that look like tobacco barns and a few teachers that look as though they ought to be worming tobacco.”  Page spent something more than a year at Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving in December, 1872.  A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely more complimentary than the judgment passed above.  They show that the young man was very unhappy.  One long letter to his mother is nothing but a boyish diatribe against the place.  “I do not care a horse apple for Trinity’s distinction,” he writes, and then he gives the reasons for this juvenile contempt.  His first report, he says, will soon reach home; he warns his mother that it will be unfavourable, and he explains that this bad showing is the result of a deliberate plot.  The boys who obtain high marks, Page declares, secure them usually by cheating or through the partisanship of the professors; a high grade therefore really means that the recipient is either a humbug or a bootlicker.  Page had therefore attempted to keep his reputation unsullied by aiming at a low academic record!  The report on that three months’ work, which still survives, discloses that Page’s conspiracy against himself did not succeed, for his marks are all high.  “Be sure to send him back” is the annotation on this document, indicating that Page had made a better impression on Trinity than Trinity had made on Page.