een 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.

But the rebellious young man did not return. After Christmas, 1872, his
schoolboy letters reveal him at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.
Here again the atmosphere is Methodistical, but of a somewhat more
genial type. "It was at Ashland that I first began to unfold," said Page
afterward. "Dear old Ashland!" Dr. Duncan, the President, was a
clergyman whose pulpit oratory is still a tradition in the South, but,
in addition to his religious exaltation, he was an exceedingly lovable,
companionable, and stimulating human being. Certainly there was no lack
of the religious impulse. "We have a preacher president," Page writes
his mother, "a preacher secretary, a preacher chaplain, and a dozen
preacher students and three or more preachers are living here and
twenty-five or thirty yet-to-be preachers in college!" In this latter
class Page evidently places himself; at least he gravely wri