lars. They gave it cheerfully. It was the widow's mite, - all she had.

In March, 1849, the son, in company with a cousin and another schoolmate, with their packs on their backs containing their few books, tin dippers, knives and forks, a frying-pan and plates, bade farewell to friends, and trudged along the highway to Chester. They found an empty room in an old unpainted building near the school, which they hired for a pittance, unpacked their tin cups, plates, knives, forks, and fryingpan, bought potatoes and bacon, and began housekeeping, boarding themselves for a few cents a day.

Young Garfield's studies were English grammar, natural philosophy, arithmetic, and algebra. He had never seen an algebra but once, before purchasing the one which he used during the term.

The eleven dollars were dwindling; so much had gone for books that the cash on hand for the table was getting low. How replenish it? It was March; too early for farm-work. Chester was a small place, but the two or three carpenters in the town were ever having odd jobs, and the boy who was feeling the tides of a new purpose bearing him on, was ready to do anything. He could push a plane. The days of planing-machines had not come, and the carpenters were ready to pay small pittances for the bone and muscle of the young student. Before breakfast, before the bell called him at nine in the morning, he was making the shavings fly in a neighboring shop. When four o'clock came in the afternoon, he rushed from the school-room to the bench. On Saturday he could

work from morning till night. While his muscle was driving the plane, his brain was intent on the value of x in an equation. When recitation came he was always fresh. The play-ground had its attractions. No boy ever pitched the quoits with keener zest than he; but behind the plane was something for the fryingpan or another suit of clothes, and behind them was the hunger of the soul- the thirst for knowledge.

When the term closed, he had money enough to pay all his bills. The eleven dollars was all the money he ever received from others; from that day on he paid his own way.

During the summer vacation he worked as carpenter or farmer in the haying or harvest field. With a schoolmate he called one day upon a farmer, who employed a large number of men. "Do you want some help?" they asked. The farmer looked at the striplings as if doubtful of their ability to do much. Can you mow?"

"Yes, sir."

"How much wages do you want?" "Just what you think is right."

"Very well, you may go to work."

Was there ever a boy that swung a scythe, that did not feel that he was a man? that he could do a man's work? James Garfield and his companion determined not only to be men in the haying field, but to surpass the other laborers in the amount and quality of their work. It required muscle, a wide reaching out of their but they did it.

arms

"See here, you lubbers," said the old farmer, ad

dressing the other hands; "those boys are beating you all hollow. Their swathes are wider, and they mow better than you do. Aren't you ashamed of

yourselves?"

Not unnaturally, the boys were fond of the farmer's praise, and remembered it. Settling-day came.

"Well, boys, how much must I pay?"
"What you think is right," they replied.

"Well, I don't know. You see you are only boysof course you can't expect men's wages."

"But have you not told the men that we mowed wider swathes, and did our work better than they? You have held us up as an example. True, we are boys, but if we have done the work of men, are we not entitled to men's pay?"

The farmer could not eat his own words. He had used the boys to shame the men, and so paid them full wages.

Back to the Academy went the boy, cooking his bacon in the frying-pan, working morning and night and Saturdays, yet making such intellectual progress, that when the fall term closed, he was deemed qualified to teach school. He found one near by.

The morning came on which he was to begin. He was not the only teacher who has looked with foreboding upon the future, when about to begin a first school.

"I dare say you will see me home before ten o'clock," he said to his mother as he started for school. Ten o'clock came, but he did not come. He was getting interested in his school, and the school in him. He was entering upon a new career, feeling the stimulus

that comes from the putting forth of intellectual powers. It was no longer mule-driving, but training the human intellect. He experienced an enthusiasm all unknown before, and at once became a popular teacher.

He was eighteen years old. Twelve months before he was on the tow-path, with grand imaginings of a life on the sea; but now he was sailing on a wider ocean than the Atlantic or Pacific, the great ocean on whose shore Isaac Newton, with all his attainments, said that he had picked only a few pebbles. The new life opened wide before him. The vision was so entrancing that he determined to strike out boldly and with a definite purpose, the obtaining of a collegiate education.

"It is a great point gained," he afterwards wrote, "when a young man makes up his mind to devote himself to the accomplishment of a definite work."

Through the summer vacation of 1850 he worked as carpenter. He had got beyond the plane, and was using the square and scratch-awl-setting other men to work. When the work was done for the day, he took up his Latin grammar.

By the spring of 1851 he emancipated himself from the frying-pan and became a boarder in a family, paying for food and clothes and washing, $1.06 per week.

The next winter he taught school again; studying hard the while, with his eye fixed on his definite purpose. He was taking a long look ahead. He could see something worth having far away, and bent all his energies to make it his own.

TH

VI.

STUDENT AT HIRAM.

HE settlers of north-eastern Ohio were, as a whole, a remarkable body of men. Many of them were deeply religious, and emigrated from the eastern States, not merely to improve their worldly condition, but to aid in establishing society on solid foundations. They were animated by a sentiment like that which brought John Winthrop and his associates to America. The glory of God was behind the movement; the planting of religious institutions in the wilderness; the doing of something to make the Republic of the future, christian. It was a grand missionary ideal. The sentiment was stimulated by the various missionary societies organized from 1816 and at later dates.

The years 1830-31 were remarkable not only for the beginning of the great temperance reformation and the agitation of the anti-slavery question, but for a great revival of religious convictions, and nowhere was the awakening deeper than in the towns of the Western Reserve in Ohio.

It was a period of religious inquiry. Old theologies and old creeds were questioned. Earnest, warm