One day I chanced to meet a student who had noticed my inventions at the Fair and now recognized me.  And when I said, “You are fortunate fellows to be allowed to study in this beautiful place.  I wish I could join you.”  “Well, why don’t you?” he asked.  “I haven’t money enough,” I said.  “Oh, as to money,” he reassuringly explained, “very little is required.  I presume you’re able to enter the Freshman class, and you can board yourself as quite a number of us do at a cost of about a dollar a week.  The baker and milkman come every day.  You can live on bread and milk.”  Well, I thought, maybe I have money enough for at least one beginning term.  Anyhow I couldn’t help trying.

With fear and trembling, overladen with ignorance, I called on Professor Stirling, the Dean of the Faculty, who was then Acting President, presented my case, and told him how far I had got on with my studies at home, and that I hadn’t been to school since leaving Scotland at the age of eleven years, excepting one short term of a couple of months at a district school, because I could not be spared from the farm work.  After hearing my story, the kind professor welcomed me to the glorious University—­next, it seemed to me, to the Kingdom of Heaven.  After a few weeks in the preparatory department I entered the Freshman class.  In Latin I found that one of the books in use I had already studied in Scotland.  So, after an interruption of a dozen years, I began my Latin over again where I had left off; and, strange to say, most of it came back to me, especially the grammar which I had committed to memory at the Dunbar Grammar School.

During the four years that I was in the University, I earned enough in the harvest-fields during the long summer vacations to carry me through the balance of each year, working very hard, cutting with a cradle four acres of wheat a day, and helping to put it in the shock.  But, having to buy books and paying, I think, thirty-two dollars a year for instruction, and occasionally buying acids and retorts, glass tubing, bell-glasses, flasks, etc., I had to cut down expenses for board now and then to half a dollar a week.

One winter I taught school ten miles south of Madison, earning much-needed money at the rate of twenty dollars a month, “boarding round,” and keeping up my University work by studying at night.  As I was not then well enough off to own a watch, I used one of my hickory clocks, not only for keeping time, but for starting the school fire in the cold mornings, and regulating class-times.  I carried it out on my shoulder to the old log schoolhouse, and set it to work on a little shelf nailed to one of the knotty, bulging logs.  The winter was very cold, and I had to go to the schoolhouse and start the fire about eight o’clock to warm it before the arrival of the scholars.  This was a rather trying job, and one that my clock might easily be made to do.  Therefore, after supper one evening I told the head