of equality, he kept
to himself, alone, silent, studying, working, but telling no one how
keenly he felt the difference between his own position and that of his
fellow students. He worked for the nearby farmers as at Wilbraham and
did anything that he could to earn money. But his clothes were poor,
his manner of living the cheapest, and except in classes, his fellow
students met him little.

He took the law course and followed fully the classical course at the
same time--a feat no student at that time had ever done and few, if
any, since. How he managed it, working as hard as he did at the
same time, to earn money, seems impossible to comprehend. His iron
constitution, for one thing, that seemed capable of standing any
strain, helped him. And his remarkable ability to photograph whole
pages of his text books on his memory was another powerful ally. He
could reel off page after page of Virgil, Homer, Blackstone--anything
he "memorized" in this unusual fashion. Well for him that he grasped
the opportunity to learn this method presented him as a child. But
it has always been one of the traits of his character to see
opportunities where others walk right over them, and to seize and make
use of them.

He did not register in the classical course as he was too poor to pay
the tuition fee, nor did he join any of the clubs, as he could not
afford it. He seldom appeared in debates or the moot courts, for
he was so shabbily dressed he felt he would not be welcome. It was
undoubtedly these humiliating experiences, combined with certain of
his studies and reading, that caused him to drift into an atheistic
train of thought. Working hard, living poor, desiring so much, yet
on all sides he saw boys with all the opportunities he longed
for, utterly indifferent to them. He saw boys spending in riotous
dissipation the money that would have meant so much to him. He saw
them recklessly squandering health, time, priceless educational
opportunities, for the veriest froth of pleasure. He saw them sowing
the wind, yet to his inexperienced eyes not reaping the whirlwind, but
faring far more prosperously than he who worked and studied hard and
yet had not what they threw so lightly away. It was all at variance
with his mother's teaching, with such of the preaching at the little
white church as he had heard. Bible promises, as he interpreted them,
were not fulfilled. So he scoffed, cynically, bitterly, and said, as
many another has done befor