Where are the two boys who, forty or fifty years from now, will take the helm of state and guide the ponderous ship farther on her tireless voyage?
No ever-recurring problem for the nation’s wisdom and the nation’s choice, is greater than this one problem of presidents. It is the nation’s offer of greatness and renown to any boy who, through long years of patient and persistent endeavor, will seek full and honorable preparation for the prize she proffers.
The brief stay at Lancaster was soon over, and James once more harnessed into the old régime at home, with Campbell Beall for teacher, in the same old house that seven years before he entered, a boy of five years old.
In one year he is to pass his examination to enter Washington and Jefferson College, in the village of Washington, their shire-town of three thousand inhabitants, twenty-four miles away. Will he be ready? Much depends on Campbell Beall, much on his father, and much on himself.
The common English branches are well wrought over, languages and mathematics have come to be a delight, and in the old atmosphere, and the old ways, with the old inspiration on him, progress comes anew. Lines of reading from the library are kept up; the papers and magazines are not neglected; political matters are settled; bad news comes in from every quarter; Tyler is at the head of affairs; Ewing has sent in his scathing letter of resignation as Secretary of the Treasury, charging him with violating every promise the Whig party made to the people; but there is no campaign, no voting to be done, so the thing is settled.
Mr. Beall proves a good teacher. The Latin begun at Lancaster is renewed at home, and so the winter goes by. Time seems literally to be alive and drifts like the snow as it goes rushing by. As Benj. F. Taylor has it:—
“How the winters are drifting like flakes of snow,
And the summers, like buds between;
And the year, in its sheaf, so they come and they go
On the river’s breast, with its ebb and its flow,