I certainly profited by my friendship with one of my tutors, Mr.Cutler; and in Harvard I owed much to the professor of English, Mr.A.S.

Hill.
Doubtless through my own fault, I saw almost nothing of President Eliot and very little of the professors.

I ought to have gained much more than I did gain from writing the themes and forensics.

My failure to do so may have been partly due to my taking no interest in the subjects.
Before I left Harvard I was already writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published on the Naval War of 1812.

Those chapters were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.