er study alone. Sparks became
restless under the double goad of his ambition and his disadvantages,
and plucking up courage, one day marched bravely into the presence of
the Rev. Hubbell Loomis, an intelligent and cultivated clergyman,
requesting his counsel and instruction. Mr. Loomis examined him
carefully, and, taking him as an inmate of his house, taught him
mathematics gratuitously, and induced him to commence the study of
Greek and Latin, encouraging the spirit of independence--which was very
lively in Sparks--by allowing him to shingle his barn as partial
compensation for board and tuition.

Hitherto, the life of a schoolmaster had been his utmost ambition, and
the trials he made satisfied him that, with his love of knowledge and
desire to impart it, he would ultimately be able to succeed. The
prospect of a college course had not yet dawned on him. But, from his
patron Loomis to others of greater influence the carpenter's merit
spread wider and wider, until the Rev. Abiel Abbott, then a clergyman
at Coventry, Connecticut, procured for him a scholarship at Phillips
Exeter Academy, upon a benevolent foundation, to which meritorious
pupils of limited means were admitted without charge for board and
instruction. On the 4th of September, 1809, he left Tolland,
Connecticut, and _walked_ the one hundred and twenty miles to Exeter,
New Hampshire, becoming a scholar of the Academy for two years. Here he
first met, as fellow pupils, his life-long friends, Palfrey and
Bancroft. He studied diligently, and made rapid progress; yet, anxious
to preserve his independence, and to obtain what was necessary for his
personal comfort without further tax on friends or obligation to
strangers, he taught, during one winter of these two years, a school at
Rochester in New Hampshire. In one of his memorandums he sums up his
tuition thus: "the whole amount of my schooling was about forty months,
which was the length of time I attended school before I was _twenty_
years old."

But the great hope of his heart--a hope that had been gradually
kindled--was at last to be realized, and, in 1811, at the age of
twenty-two, through the active interest of President Kirkland, Sparks
entered Harvard University, on a Pennoyer scholarship. Yet, the _res
angusta domi_ pursued him still. It is said, that, "in consequence
partly of ill health and partly of poverty," he was unable to pass more
than two entire years, of his four, at Cambridge. To eke out a