Besides
these advantages, my guardian held in trust for me about two thousand
dollars. After some consultation between us, it was resolved that I
should study medicine. This conclusion was reached nine years before the
Rebellion broke out, and after we had settled, for the sake of economy,
in Woodbury, New Jersey. From this time I saw very little of my deaf
aunt or of Peninnah. I was resolute to rise in the world, and not to be
weighted by relatives who were without my tastes and my manners.

I set out for Philadelphia, with many good counsels from my aunt and
guardian. I look back upon this period as a turning-point of my life.
I had seen enough of the world already to know that if you can succeed
without exciting suspicion, it is by far the pleasantest way; and I
really believe that if I had not been endowed with so fatal a liking
for all the good things of life I might have lived along as reputably as
most men. This, however, is, and always has been, my difficulty, and
I suppose that I am not responsible for the incidents to which it gave
rise. Most men have some ties in life, but I have said I had none which
held me. Peninnah cried a good deal when we parted, and this, I think,
as I was still young, had a very good effect in strengthening my
resolution to do nothing which could get me into trouble. The janitor
of the college to which I went directed me to a boarding-house, where
I engaged a small third-story room, which I afterwards shared with Mr.
Chaucer of Georgia. He pronounced it, as I remember, "Jawjah."

In this very remarkable abode I spent the next two winters, and finally
graduated, along with two hundred more, at the close of my two years of
study. I should previously have been one year in a physician's office as
a student, but this regulation was very easily evaded. As to my studies,
the less said the better. I attended the quizzes, as they call them,
pretty closely, and, being of a quick and retentive memory, was thus
enabled to dispense with some of the six or seven lectures a day which
duller men found it necessary to follow.

Dissecting struck me as a rather nasty business for a gentleman, and on
this account I did just as little as was absolutely essential. In fact,
if a man took his tickets and paid the dissection fees, nobody troubled
himself as to whether or not he did any more than this. A like evil
existed at the graduation: whether you squeezed through or passed with
credit was a thing whic