And how has this change been brought about! By energy,
perseverance, and a resolute purpose--a soul that poverty could not
daunt, an ambition which shrank from no hardship, and no amount of
labor. They have been years of toil, for it takes time to transform a
raw and ignorant country lad into a college president; but the toil has
not harmed him--the poverty has not cramped him, nor crippled his
energies. "Poverty is very inconvenient," he said on one occasion, in
speaking of those early years, "but it is a fine spur to activity, and
may be made a rich blessing."

The young man now had an assured income; not a large one, but Hiram was
but an humble village. No fashionable people lived there. The people
were plain in their tastes, and he could live as well as the best
without difficulty. He was employed in a way that interested and pleased
him, and but one thing seemed wanting. His heart had never swerved from
the young lady with whom he first became acquainted at Geauga, to whom
he was more closely drawn at Hiram, and to whom now for some years he
had been betrothed. He felt that he could now 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