great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement.  There will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study’s sake is invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the following of them.  In my case the result of the imposed career was a disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism, as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the exercises of the college course.  The consequences were the graver that I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander.  I came out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely.  Before entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty, the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante, for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which make the successful artist were past.

It was decided that I should continue my preparation for college in the Lyceum of my native town, a quaint octagonal building in which the students were seated in two tiers of stalls, the partitions between which were on radii drawn from a centre on the master’s desk, so that nothing the pupil did escaped his supervision.  The larger boys, some of whom were over sixteen, were in a basement similarly arranged with a single tier of desks, and I earned my instruction by supervising this room.  I had here full authority so far as the maintenance of order was concerned and kept it, though some of the pupils were older than myself.  I remember that one of them, about my own age and presumed strength, but himself convinced of his superiority, repeated some act which I had reprimanded him for, and as I knew that to allow it to pass unpunished was to put an end to my authority and position, yet did not feel competent or authorized to give him a regular flogging, I caught him by the collar and jerked him into the middle of the room, setting him down on the floor with force enough to bewilder him a little, and ordered him to sit there till I released him, and his surprise was such that he actually did not move till I told him to.  I met no attempt to put my authority at defiance after that.  A schoolfellow here and classmate in college was Chester A. Arthur, afterward President of the United States, a brilliant Hellenist, and one of the best scholars and thinkers in the class.