I joined the Y.M.C.A. for the physical side, not for the spiritual. I found a spirit that I did not like there, a sort of mental deadness and ineffectually. But one thing the Y.M.C.A. did for me: I found on the bulletin board one day an announcement of the summer term of Mt. Hebron Preparatory School.... It was a school for poor boys and men ... neither age nor even previous preparation counted ... only earnestness of purpose. And, as each student had his two hours' work a day to do, the expense for each term was nominal.
I had been paid fifty dollars for my article on my adventures in the New York Sunday paper. A Newark Sunday paper bought several articles also. To the money I had saved up my father contributed as much again. I started for preparatory school.
Mt. Hebron School consisted of a series of buildings set apart on a hill. It was an evangelical school founded by a well-known revivalist—William Moreton.
Around it lay pine forests and, at its feet, the valley of the Connecticut River.
No matter what subjects they taught, the main endeavour of its professors, in season and out, was the conversion of every freshman immediately to Evangelical Christianity, as soon as he had had his quarters assigned to him....
Scarcely had we settled ourselves, each with his roommate, than the two weeks' revival began. I will not enter into the details of this revival. This was merely the opening of the summer term. At the opening of the school year in the fall—that was when they held the real revival,—and the story of the whipped-up frenzy of that will afford a more characteristic flavour.
It put a singing in my heart to find myself at last a student in a regular preparatory school, with my face set toward college.
I had passed my examinations with credit, especially the one in the Bible. This won me immediate notice and approval among the professors. Fortunate, indeed, I now regarded those three months in jail ... the most fruitful and corrective period of my life. For not only had I studied the Bible assiduously there, but I had learned American history—especially that of the Civil War period ... and I had studied arithmetic and algebra, so that in these subjects I managed to slide through.