smallest degree for any remark she ever made. It would have been
perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be
misinterpreted; but, without any design, and with the intelligence and
coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that
I ever heard of. With the competition that has been against me, such
discretion has been a real blessing."

Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the
mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to
sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands. But as James
A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step
by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and
sympathetic companion and helpmeet.

They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the
college campus; and so their wedded life began. It was a modest home,
but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the
White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted. As
President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of
Hiram College, to his family. Greatness has its penalties, and a low
estate its compensations.

CHAPTER XIX.

GARFIELD AS A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.

When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown
boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position
of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, "In
seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that
boy will be the president," we can imagine their amazement.

Yet it had all come true. Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a
thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward
stride is made in so short a time.

After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of
a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion
when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become?"

For information upon this point, we go to one of his pupils, Rev. I.L.
Darsie, of Danbury, Conn., who writes as follows:

"I attended the Western Reserve Institute when Garfield was principal,
and I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me,
and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor, and was janitor of
the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as
he had done only six years before, when