Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. III.djvu/207

 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 169 American annals reveal no other promotion so rapid and so varied. On his return to Ohio, in 1856, he resumed his place as a teacher of Latin and Greek at Hiram institute, and the next year (1857), being then only twenty-six years of age, he was made its president. He was a successful officer, and ambitious, as usual, beyond his allotted task. He discussed before his interested classes almost every subject of current interest in scholarship, science, religion, and art. The story spread, and his influence with it; he be came an intellectual and moral force in the West ern Reserve. It was greatest, however, over the young. They keenly felt the contagion of his man liness, his sympathy, his thirst for knowledge, and his veneration for the truth when it was found. As an educator, he was, and always would have been, eminently successful; he had the knowledge, the art to impart it, and the personal magnetism that impressed his love for it upon his pupils. His in tellectual activity at this time was intense. The canons of his church permitted him to preach, and he used the permission. He also pursued the study of law, entering his name, in 1858, as a student in a law-office in Cleveland, but studying in Hiram. To one ignorant of the slow development that was characteristic of Garfield in all directions, it would seem incredible that he now for the first time began to show any noticeable interest in politics. He