DR. SAMUEL STANHOPE SMITH AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
When I was at Princeton College, Dr. Samuel Stanhope Smith was its president. A learned and able man, and an eloquent preacher, blameless in his life, his influence was great, not only over his college, but far and wide over the surrounding country.
I trust that it is one of the merits of our Republic, that truly great and good men will always have this influence and respect. Surely we have cast off those impediments to human progress which exist in other lands, where tributes due to real merit are paid to men for their accumulation of riches. Our offices in the states will almost always be bestowed on the deserving. The tricks of the politician will be generally unknown, because our people will hold them in abhorrence. In the old countries legislative bodies have felt the force of bribes. But I will boldly turn prophet here, and say, that no such practices will ever be known in such deliberative bodies in New Jersey. I can imagine the shame which the pure-minded people of this common-wealth must be ready to visit on one proven guilty of such a detestable enormity. Indeed he would incur the risk of being burnt alive at the stake.
The influence which Dr. Smith attained by the purest means, he exercised for the public good. His mind was of a philosophic cast, and he abhorred all superstition. Hence he was always eager to dispel the errors of the ignorant, and to remove the fears excited by diseased imaginations.
One day I was plodding over a page of Sophocles. No doubt it contained beauties whose discovery would repay toil. I was, however, unable to say, as I pondered it, lexicon by my side, with the Frenchman, "hang these ancients, they are always anticipating our bright thoughts," for I was not yet able to compare the idea of the Greek with the scintillations of genius which had flashed through my mind, and which were laid up for the future edification of the world, because I could not determine what the old dramatist had intended to say to us.
While I was in this state of most unpleasant perplexity, there was a knock at my door. I knew it at once to be that of our tutor. He informed me that the great doctor wished to see me and the rest of my class at his study.
We were thus invited,—that is, we had as strict a summons as any soldiers could receive from their commander,—to appear at his residence, the famous house under whose roof so many illustrious men have found shelter. Long may it stand!
It could not take much time to collect the designated young gentlemen together. Before we met, each individual brain was greatly exercised with speculations, concerning the cause of our being thus summoned to the study of our venerable head. When we were a collective body the various streams of conjecture being thrown in a torrent together, the effervescence exceeded all my powers of description.
It was a trying hour when any one of us had to come face to face with Dr. Smith.
We were not aware that any evil deed had been committed of late in the college. We all felt a bold conviction of individual innocence. Indeed, all college fellows are innocent always, until they are proved to be guilty.