The kindly face that I remembered so well again beamed upon me, as I stood before him and said that I had come to stay a year, at least, at his school. At his good-natured question as to how much money I had, I emptied my pocket of just thirty-five dollars in gold. That was the sum to which the unforeseen expenses of my long journey had reduced me.
The president, being aware that the river was frozen,—so that I could not get away even if I had had money enough to go with,—and having much greater discretionary power than the presidents of our Protestant colleges, told me that I might stay.
At the end of my year the river was again frozen, and the good president was again prevailed upon to keep me till the close of that college term, which would be in the middle of the ensuing summer. So I was for sixteen months in all a student in St. Vincent’s College.
Most of the students were the sons of French planters of Louisiana, and the institution was more French than English. Things were ordered very much as they are in the religious houses of Europe. We slept in large dormitories, and ate in a refectory, some one reading aloud the while from an English or French book. The College had its own tailors and shoemakers; and by the favor of the president, who seemed to take a great liking to me, my credit was made good for anything I wanted, and I was provided for as well as the richest of them.
The instructors were all priests, and generally good men. They never required me to change my religion, or to conform more than externally to their worship. I applied myself so zealously to study that, at the expiration of my sixteen months, I was nearly prepared to enter Kenyon College, in which I spent the next four years.
The president of St. Vincent’s, Father Stephen V. Ryan, has since met the recognition which his piety and abilities so justly deserved. He is now the venerable Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo; and it is with no little pride that I still class him among my most valued and constant friends.
When I came to leave St. Vincent’s I drew out a deposit which I had in a bank in Toledo, and gave it into the hands of the College treasurer, reserving for myself only what I thought would be enough to take me back to Ohio.
As good luck would have it, the little steamer Banjo, a show-boat belonging to Dr. Spaulding, the manager of the Floating Palace, was advertised to be at Cape Girardeau the week in which I purposed to leave there. Seeing the names of some of my old comrades on the bills, I waited to meet them. They generously made me bring my trunk on board, and have a free ride to St. Louis, or, if I chose, to Alton, where I was to take the cars for Chicago.
The remembrance of this trip up the river with these jovial, reckless souls has made it my duty always to defend my old associates when I hear the censure heaped on them by inconsiderate ignorance or blind prejudice. And I can take my final leave of the show business and of show people in no better way, I think, than in relating an incident which occurred on this little steamer.
On the afternoon before our arrival at Alton, as I was sitting on the deck by the side of one of the performers, Mr. Edwin Davis, who had been a member of our company on the Floating Palace, he asked me to let him see my money, adding that I might have had imposed upon me some of the “wild-cat” bills then afloat. Taking out all I had, I placed it in his hands. He counted it, and scrutinized it thoroughly, and, folding it up carefully, returned it to me with the remark that my bills were all good.