CHAPTER XIX.
GARFIELD AS A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.
When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, "In seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that boy will be the president," we can imagine their amazement.
Yet it had all come true.

Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward stride is made in so short a time.
After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become ?" For information upon this point, we go to one of his pupils, Rev.I.L.
Darsie, of Danbury, Conn., who writes as follows: "I attended the Western Reserve Institute when Garfield was principal, and I recall vividly his method of teaching.

He took very kindly to me, and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor, and was janitor of the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil in the same college.

He was full of animal spirits, and used to run out on the green every day and play cricket with his scholars.

He was a tall, strong man, but dreadfully awkward.