Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands. But as James A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and sympathetic companion and helpmeet.
They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the college campus; and so their wedded life began. It was a modest home, but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted. As President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of Hiram College, to his family. Greatness has its penalties, and a low estate its compensations.
Chapter XIX—Garfield As A College President.
When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, "In seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that boy will be the president," we can imagine their amazement.
Yet it had all come true. Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward stride is made in so short a time.
After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become?"
For information upon this point, we go to one of his pupils, Rev. I.L. Darsie, of Danbury, Conn., who writes as follows:
"I attended the Western Reserve Institute when Garfield was principal, and I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me, and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor, and was janitor of the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil in the same college. He was full of animal spirits, and used to run out on the green every day and play cricket with his scholars. He was a tall, strong man, but dreadfully awkward. Every now and then he would get a hit, and he muffed his ball and lost his hat as a regular thing.[1] He was left-handed, too, and that made him seem all the clumsier. But he was most powerful and very quick, and it was easy for us to understand how it was that he had acquired the reputation of whipping all the other mule-drivers on the canal, and of making himself the hero of that thoroughfare, when he followed its tow-path, only ten years earlier.