Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/29

Rh Louisiana is desirable. Decided in the negative, 17 to 1." For they were high and hot Federalists.

I have my father's part when he graduated. It is on the improvements in social order made in the last fifty years.

So soon as he left college he engaged as tutor in the family of John J. Dickinson in Troy, not far from Williamstown. But he went home first, and on his way to Troy went to the city of New York for the first time. The population was only about seventy-five thousand. It was three years before Fulton's Clermont, his first steamboat, went up the Hudson, and the tradition in our family is that my father went up the river in a sloop to Troy, was a fortnight in going, and read through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" on the way.

Judging from his accomplishments Williams College must have done its work well. He read Latin well and with pleasure to the end of his life. He did not keep up his Greek with the same interest, but he was an accurate Greek scholar. He was a mathematician of