He here divides the honors pleasantly between the forest-bred and city-trained youth, having, from his own experience, an interest in each class. Yet I think he must have sided, in fact, with the country boys. Horatio Bridge, his classmate, and throughout life a more confidential friend than Pierce, was brought up on his father's estate at Bridgton, north of Sebago Lake; and Franklin Pierce, in the class above him, his only other frequent companion, was a native of the New Hampshire hill-lands. He himself, in his outward bearing, perhaps gathered to his person something the look of both the seaport lads and the sturdy mountaineers and woodsmen. He was large and strong (in a letter to his uncle Robert, just before entering college, he gives the measure of his foot, for some new shoes that are to be sent; it is ten inches), but an interior and ruling grace removed all suspicion of heaviness. Being a sea-captain's son, he would naturally make his connections at college with men who had the out-of-doors glow about them; the simple and severe life at Raymond, too, had put him in sympathy with the people rather than with the patricians (although I see that the reminiscences of some of the old dwellers near Raymond describe the widow and her brother Richard as being exclusive and what was there thought "aristocratic"). Hawthorne, Pierce, and Bridge came together in the Athenaean Society, the newer club of the two college literary unions, and the more democratic; and the trio preserved their cordial relations intact for forty years, sometimes amid confusions and misconstructions, or between cross-fires of troublous counter-considerations, with a rare fidelity. Hawthorne held eminent scholarship easily within his grasp, but he and his two cronies seem to have taken their curriculum very easily, though they all came off well in the graduation. Hawthorne was a good Latinist. The venerable Professor Packard has said that his Latin compositions, even in the Freshman year, were remarkable; and Mr. Longfellow tells me that he recalls the graceful and poetic translations which his classmate used to give from the Roman authors. He got no celebrity in Greek, I believe, but he always kept up his liking for the Latin writers. Some years since a Latin theme of his was found, which had been delivered at an exhibition of the Athenaean Society, in December, 1823. [Footnote: See Appendix II.] It shows some niceties of selection, and the style is neat; I even fancy something individual in the choice of the words _sanctior nec beatior_, as applied to the republic, and a distinctly Hawthornesque distinction in the _fulgor tantum fuit sine fervore_; though a relic of this kind should not be examined too closely, and claims the same exemption that one gives to Shelley's school-compelled verses, _In Horologium_.