AS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR
CHAPTER XV
LIFE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN--1857-1864As I looked out upon the world during my childhood, there loomed up within my little horizon certain personages as ideals. Foremost of these was the surpliced clergyman of the parish. So strong was my admiration for him that my dear mother, during her entire life, never relinquished the hope, and indeed the expectation, that Iwould adopt the clerical profession.
Another object of my admiration--to whose profession I aspired--was the village carpenter. He ``did things,''
and from that day to this I have most admired the men who ``do things.''
Yet another of these personages was the principal of Cortland Academy. As I saw him addressing his students, or sitting in the midst of them observing with a telescope the satellites of Jupiter, I was overawed. A sense of my littleness overcame me, and I hardly dared think of aspiring to duties so exalted.
But at the age of seven a new ideal appeared. The family had removed from the little town where I was born to Syracuse, then a rising village of about five thousand inhabitants. The railways, east and west, had just been created,--the beginnings of what is now the New York Central Railroad,--and every day, so far as possible, Iwent down-town ``to see the cars go out.'' During a large part of the year there was but one passenger-train in each direction, and this was made up of but three or four small compartment-cars drawn by a locomotive which would now be considered ridiculously small, at the rate of twelve to fifteen miles an hour.
Yet I doubt whether the express trains on the New York Central, drawn by hundred-ton locomotives at a speed of sixty miles an hour, produce on the youth of the present generation anything like the impression made by those simple beginnings. The new personage who now attracted my homage was the locomotive-driver. To me his profession transcended all others. As he mounted the locomotive, and especially as he pulled the starting-bar, all other functions seemed insignificant. Every day I contemplated him; often I dreamed of him; saw him in my mind's eye dashing through the dark night, through the rain and hail, through drifting snow, through perils of ``wash-outs'' and ``snake-heads,'' and no child in the middle ages ever thought with more awe of a crusading knight leading his troops to the Holy City than did I think of this hero standing at his post in all weathers, conducting his train to its destination beyond the distant hills. It was indeed the day of small things. The traveler passing from New York to Buffalo in those days changed from the steamer at Albany to the train for Schenectady, there changed to the train for Utica, thence took the train for Syracuse, there stayed overnight, then took a train for Auburn, where he found the train for Rochester, and after two more changes arrived in Buffalo after a journey of two days and a night, which is now made in from eight to ten hours.
But the locomotive-driver was none the less a personage, and I must confess that my old feeling of respect for him clings to me still. To this hour I never see him controlling his fiery steed without investing him with some of the attributes which I discerned in him during my childhood.
It is evident to me that the next heroes whom poets will exploit will be the drivers of our railway trains and the pilots of our ocean steamers. One poet has, indeed, made a beginning already,--and this poet the Secretary of State of the United States under whom I am now serving, the Hon.
John Hay. Still another poet, honored throughout the world, has also found a hero in the engine-driver, and Rudyard Kipling will no doubt be followed by others.
But my dream of becoming a locomotive-driver faded, and while in college I speculated not a little as to what, after all, should be my profession. The idea of becoming a clergyman had long since left my mind. The medical profession had never attracted me. For the legal profession I sought to prepare myself somewhat, but as I saw it practised by the vast majority of lawyers, it seemed a waste of all that was best in human life. Politics were from an early period repulsive to me, and, after my first sight of Washington in its shabby, sleazy, dirty, unkempt condition under the old slave oligarchy, political life became absolutely repugnant to my tastes and desires. At times a longing came over me to settle down in the country, to make an honest living from a farm--a longing which took its origin in a visit which I had made as a child to the farm of an uncle who lived upon the shores of Seneca Lake. He was a man of culture, who, by the aid of a practical farmer and an income from other sources, got along very well. His roomy, old-fashioned house, his pleasant library, his grounds sloping to the lake, his peach-orchard, which at my visit was filled with delicious fruit, and the pleasant paths through the neighboring woods captivated me, and for several years the agricultural profession lingered in my visions as the most attractive of all.
As I now look back to my early manhood, it seems that my natural inclination should have been toward journalism;but although such a career proves attractive to many of our best university-bred men now, it was not so then.
