Then Immy decided that the country was dull. The young men went back to town, or to their various colleges. Keith went to Columbia College, which was still in Park Place, though plans were afoot for moving it out into the more salubrious rural district of Fiftieth Street and Madison Avenue.
Keith met Chirnside on the campus, but he could not force a quarrel without dragging Immy’s name into it. So he let slip the opportunity for punishment, as his father had let slip the occasion for punishing Chalender. Father and son were curiously alike in their passion for secrets.
Keith had little interest in the classic studies that made up most of the curriculum. He could not endure Latin and the only thing he found tolerable in Cæsar was the description of the bridge that baffled the other students with its difficulties.
He was an engineer by nature. He had never recovered from his ambition to be an hydraulic savior of the city. And it looked as if the town would soon need another redemption.
The citizens had treated the Croton as a toy at first. The hydrants were free and the waste was ruinous. This blessing, like the heavenly manna, became contemptible with familiarity. Children made a pastime of sprinkling the yards and the streets. The habit of bathing grew until many were soaking their hides every day. During the winter the householders let the water run all day and all night through the open faucets, to prevent the pipes from freezing. There were twelve thousand people, too, who had water in their houses!
Already in 1846 the Commissioners had begun to talk of a costly new reservoir as a necessity. For thirteen days that year the supply had to be shut off while the aqueduct was inspected and leaks repaired. What if another great fire had started?
In 1849 the Water Commissioners were dismissed and the Croton Aqueduct Department entrusted with the priesthood of the river god and his elongated temple.
So Keith looked forward to the time when he should be needed by New York and by other cities. And he studied hard. But he played hard, too. The students were a lawless set, and drunkenness and religious infidelity were rival methods for distressing their teachers. Up at New Haven the Yale boys in a certain class, feeling themselves wronged by a certain professor, had disguised themselves as Indians and with long knives whittled all the study benches into shavings while the terrified instructor cowered on his throne and watched.
Vice of every sort seemed to be the chief study of such of the students as were not aiming at the ministry. As one of the college graduates wrote:
“Hot suppers, midnight carousals were too frequent with us and sowed the seed of a vice that in a few years carried off a fearful proportion of our members to an untimely grave.”