The freshmen and sophomores, delegated to the care of the junior professors and tutors, indulged in many of the escapades of juvenility for which university life in most countries is distinguished, and were continually brought under the inflictions of college discipline, and now and then some one was expelled.  The favorite tricks of getting a horse or cow into the recitation rooms, fastening the tutors in their rooms just before the class hours, tying up, or stealing, the bell which used to wake the students and call them to prayers or recitations, with rare and perilous excursions into the civic domain, or a fire alarm caused by setting fire to the outhouses, which always brought down on us the wrath of the firemen, varied the monotony of the student life, as everywhere else; but as I roomed at home for the first year I never had part in these escapades, and in my sophomore winter I took a district school in one of the valleys tributary to that of the Mohawk, in which the town lies.

The community in which the school was situated was almost exclusively composed of Scotch Cameronians, of whom several families were the descendants of a then still vigorous patriarch of the sternest type of that creed.  It was necessary to pass a special examination to get the State certificate necessary to teach a district school, and this I had passed, but had still to undergo the questioning of the trustees of the district, canny and cautious beyond the common.  The wages for such a school were twelve dollars a month and “board around,” i.e. staying at the houses of the parents a week for each pupil in turn, beginning with those in best estate, so that, as the school had never less than twenty or thirty pupils, the poorer families were never called on.  One of the boys intended to go to college, and his father was willing to pay a special contribution to secure a teacher of Latin, and this brought my wages up to sixteen dollars a month.  But the cautious Scots urged a conditional engagement,—­a trial of one month,—­a condition which, as I might have anticipated, would end the engagement with the month, considering the composition of the district and the usual difference of views among the people.  The two most advanced and oldest of the pupils belonged to families bound together by the most cordial jealousy which a petty community could inspire, and one of these was my Latin pupil.  His rival was a lazy student and a turbulent scholar, with whom I had difficulties from insubordination from the beginning.  As, however, I had adopted the rule of depending entirely on moral suasion in the government of the school and refused to flog, but instead offered prizes for good behavior and studiousness at my own expense for each week, my confidence in the better qualities of human nature betrayed me from the beginning.  The prizes went to stimulate the jealousies between the two leaders, and the only punishment I would inflict, that of sending the pupil home for disobedience, made domestic difficulties.