There were two associate principals at the head of the school, one for the classics, and the other for mathematics.  Of the former I became a favorite on account of the facility with which I got on in his branches, and when the year was up I passed easily the examinations for entrance into college, and by his advice entered in the freshman year, though fairly well prepared to enter the sophomore with slight conditions.  He was anxious that I should do him credit in college.  But long before the term was out I found that the routine gave me hardly an occupation.  I had already done all the mathematics of the year at De Ruyter, and the Latin and Greek came so easy that I found myself idle most of my time.  I decided to try a fresh examination in order to gain a year by reentering as a sophomore.  The faculty declared such a thing unprecedented and inadmissible, to which I replied that I would then go to another college and enter, quite oblivious of the fact that I had neither the means nor the consent of my family to leave its protection and go to another city.  The classical principal of the Lyceum, who was also a tutor in the college, did what he could to dissuade me, but I persisted and offered myself for examination, and found him on the examining committee.  He was really fond of me, and in my own interest wanted me to go through college with honors, but this was to me of trivial importance, compared with the abbreviation by a year of the captivity of college life.  He punished me by putting me to read for examination a passage of Juvenal, which I had never opened, as it did not come in the course even of the sophomores, but I passed fairly well on it, and he, with a little irritation, gave me the certificate, saying that it was not for what I did, but for what he knew me to be capable of.  So, conditioned by some trivial supplementary examinations on subjects which I do not remember, I went up a class.

The constitution of Union College, like most of the American schools of the highest grade at that time, differed from that of the English model in some respects very widely.  The “University” of Union was completed by collegated schools for medicine, divinity, law, and technical education.  The medical and law schools of Union were at Albany, the capital of New York State.  Our college buildings were three—­one, West College, in the town, for the freshman and sophomore classes, and two on the hill above the town, North and South colleges, for the juniors and seniors.  As a large proportion of the students were young men to whom the expenses of the education were a serious matter, many prepared themselves at home to enter the junior class, so that a class which only numbered a score as freshmen, often graduated a hundred.  Others, again, used to spend the winter term and vacations in teaching in the rural or “district” schools to pay the expenses of the other terms, and the majority of the graduates were of these classes of men, often adults on entering, so that the class gathered seriousness as it went on.