Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/304

 school for eighteen months. Happy days of lightly won “sheepskins”! In the College itself the A.M. was merely a premium awarded to any one who survived his A.B. for three years; and many graduates refused to take it on account of its utter worthlessness.

Short as was the school course, even shorter periods of residence were common; there was a regular arrangement by which a man on payment of twenty-five dollars could enroll in the school for half of one term. As may be easily imagined, such a brief exposure to the classic Cambridge influences produced little effect on the more erratic spirits of the school; and the quaint legend of the manner in which a poor but ingenious candidate from “down East” managed to save all expense for light, while preparing himself for college, by studying in a lighthouse, is not more incredible than that of the newly fledged LL.B. who was discovered setting out for legal conquests in the far West equipped solely with an axe and a demijohn of ink.

Once fairly started on the legal path, the student of those days found the life by no means hard. His textbooks were lent to him by the school, the library having a vast stock of duplicates of the standard treatises. These he studied, or not, as he felt inclined. One of the instructors of that golden age admits in his memoirs that though “a list of books was made up, for a course