My father took it out of my hands, and I
came to regard it much as I would a bottle labelled "Poison." In
consequence I never read it in the days of its vogue, and I have to
admit that since then, in mature years, I have not been able to
continue it after beginning. The same motives, in great part, led to
my being sent to a boarding-school in Maryland, near Hagerstown, which
drew its pupils very largely, though not exclusively, from the South.
The environment would be upon the whole Southern. I remained there,
however, only two years, my father becoming dissatisfied with my
progress in mathematics. In 1854, therefore, I matriculated as a
freshman at Columbia College in the city of New York, where I remained
till I went to the Naval Academy.

My entrance into the navy was greatly against my father's wish. I do
not remember all his arguments, but he told me he thought me much less
fit for a military than for a civil profession, having watched me
carefully. I think myself now that he was right; for, though I have no
cause to complain of unsuccess, I believe I should have done better
elsewhere. While thus more than dissenting from my choice, he held
that a child should not be peremptorily thwarted in his scheme of
life. Consequently, while he would not actively help me in the
doubtful undertaking of obtaining an appointment, which depended then
as now upon the representative from the congressional district, he
gave me the means to go to Washington, and also two or three letters
to personal friends; among them Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of
War, and James Watson Webb, a prominent character in New York
journalism and in politics, both state and national.

Thus equipped, I started for Washington on the first day of 1856,
being then three months over fifteen. As I think now of my age, and
more than usual diffidence, and of my omission, to win the favor of a
politician who had constituents to reward, whereas to all my family
practical politics were as foreign as Sanskrit, I know not whether the
situation were more comical or pathetic. On the way I foregathered
with a Southern lad, some three years my senior, returning home from
England, where he had been at school. He beguiled the time by stories
of his experiences, to me passing strange; and I remember, in crossing
the Susquehanna, which was then by ferry-boat, looking at the fields
of ice fragments, I said it would be unpleasant to fall in. "I would
sooner have a knife s