desk in the United States Senate. Brooks intended to kill him on the spot, and his villainous purpose was nearly accomplished.

On receipt of the news at Williams College the students called an indignation meeting, at which James, boiling over with indignant remonstrance against such an outrage, delivered the most telling and powerful speech that had fallen from his lips up to that time. His fellow-students listened with wonder and admiration. They were so completely charmed by his fervour and eloquence that they sat in breathless attention until he closed, when their loud applause rang through the building, repeated again and again in the wildest enthusiasm.

“The uncompromising foe to slavery!” exclaimed one of his admirers.

“Old Williams will be prouder of her student than she is to-day, even,” remarked another.

And many were the words of surprise and gratification expressed, and many of the prophecies concerning the future renown of young Garfield.

We said that James rejected fiction from his reading, on principle. When about half through his college course he found that his mind was suffering from excess of solid food. Mental dyspepsia was the consequence. His mind was not assimilating what he read, and was losing its power of application. He was advised to read fiction moderately. “Romance is as valuable a part of intellectual food as salad of a dinner. In its place, its discipline to the mind is equal to that of science in its place.” He finally accepted the theory, read one volume of fiction each month, and soon found his mind returning to its former elasticity. Some of the works of Walter Scott, Cooper, Dickens, and Thackeray, not to mention others, became the cure of his mental malady. His method of taking notes in reading was systematically continued in college. Historical references, mythological allusions, technical terms, and other things, not well understood at the time, were noted, and afterwards looked up in the library, so that nothing should remain doubtful or obscure in his mind. “The ground his mind traversed he carefully cleared and ploughed before leaving it for fresh fields.”

James graduated in 1856, bearing off the honours of his class. Dr. Hopkins had established the “metaphysical oration” as the highest honour at Commencement, and James won it, by the universal consent of the faculty and students. In the performance of his part at Commencement, he fully sustained his well-earned reputation for scholarship and eloquence. Both teachers and class-mates fully expected, when he left college, that his name would appear conspicuously in the future history of his country.

Dr. Hopkins wrote of him, eight years after James graduated:—

“The course of General Garfield has been one which the young men of the country may well emulate. … A rise so rapid in both civil and military life is, perhaps, without example in the country. … Obtaining his education almost wholly by his own exertions, and having reached the age when he could fully appreciate the highest studies, General Garfield gave himself to study with a zest and delight wholly unknown to those who find in it a routine. A religious man, and a man of principle, he pursued, of his own accord, the ends proposed by the institution. He was prompt, frank, manly, social in his tendencies; combining active exercise with habits of study, and this did for himself what it is the object of a college to enable every young man to do— he made himself a MAN. There never was a time when we more needed those who would follow his example.”

Mr. Chadbourne, who is now president of Williams College, and who was professor when James was a student, writes:—

“He graduated in 1856, soon after I began my work here as professor. The students who came under my instruction then made a much stronger impression upon me than those of a later day, since my attention has been called to other interests than those of the lecture-room. But Garfield, as a student, was one who would at any time impress himself upon the memory of his instructors, by his manliness and excellence