But my dream of becoming a locomotive-driver faded, and while in college I speculated not a little as to what, after all, should be my profession. The idea of becoming a clergyman had long since left my mind. The medical profession had never attracted me. For the legal profession I sought to prepare myself somewhat, but as I saw it practised by the vast majority of lawyers, it seemed a waste of all that was best in human life. Politics were from an early period repulsive to me, and, after my first sight of Washington in its shabby, sleazy, dirty, unkempt condition under the old slave oligarchy, political life became absolutely repugnant to my tastes and desires. At times a longing came over me to settle down in the country, to make an honest living from a farm--a longing which took its origin in a visit which I had made as a child to the farm of an uncle who lived upon the shores of Seneca Lake. He was a man of culture, who, by the aid of a practical farmer and an income from other sources, got along very well. His roomy, old-fashioned house, his pleasant library, his grounds sloping to the lake, his peach-orchard, which at my visit was filled with delicious fruit, and the pleasant paths through the neighboring woods captivated me, and for several years the agricultural profession lingered in my visions as the most attractive of all. As I now look back to my early manhood, it seems that my natural inclination should have been toward journalism; but although such a career proves attractive to many of our best university-bred men now, it was not so then. In those days men did not prepare for it; they drifted into it. I do not think that at my graduation there was one out of the one hundred and eight members of my class who had the slightest expectation of permanently connecting himself with a newspaper. This seems all the more singular since that class has since produced a large number of prominent journalists, and among these George Washburne Smalley, the most eminent, by far, among American newspaper correspondents of our time; Evarts Greene, a leading editor of Worcester; Delano Goddard, late editor of the ``Boston Advertiser''; Kinsley Twining, for a considerable time an editor of the ``Independent''; Isaac Bromley, who for years delighted the Republican party with his contributions to the editorial page of the ``Tribune''; Dr. James Morris Whiton, a leading writer for the ``Outlook''; and others. Yet in those days probably not one of these ever thought of turning to journalism as a career. There were indeed at that time eminent editors, like Weed, Croswell, Greeley, Raymond, and Webb, but few college-bred men thought of journalism as a profession. Looking back upon all this, I feel certain that, were I to begin life again with my present experience, that would be the career for which I would endeavor to fit myself. It has in it at present many admirable men, but far more who are manifestly unfit. Its capacities for good or