In college he was fond of athletic sports, ready in wit, beginning to show his eloquence in debate, an ardent temperance advocate, a lover of rhetoric, botany, and geology, and a warm friend to his classmates. He cared little for the classics; but he read much, especially the old English authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others. Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who was at Amherst with young Beecher, says, "He was by all odds the best debater of his college generation. I should be glad to know how he acquired his mastery of the English language.... The four books which probably helped him most were the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.'" "He was," said Dr. John Haven, a classmate, "a great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated." He necessarily used the greatest economy in college, his board costing him but one dollar and fifty cents a week, a mile from college grounds; and when vacation came he walked more than a hundred miles to Boston, because he had no money to pay the stage-coach fare. Charles Beecher, the youngest of Roxana's children, was in college with his brother Henry. Dr. Beecher became so straitened in money matters that it seemed probable that the sons must leave college. He and his wife talked the matter over till finally he said, "Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will." The mother lay awake after she had gone to bed, and cried over it; evidently she was not as cold at heart as the young Henry Ward thought. The next morning was the Sabbath. The door-bell rang, and a one hundred dollar bill was handed in from Mr. Homes, as a thank-offering for the conversion of one of his children. The way was now opened for the boys to continue their college course. After Henry had been at Amherst less than a year, in the spring vacation of 1831, he and another student walked fifty miles to the home of a classmate, and there fell in love with the sister of the latter, Eunice White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard of West Sutton, Mass. "After our outside work was done," writes Mrs. Beecher, years later, "mother and I took knitting and sewing and sat down with them. I was going to wind a skein of sewing-silk (that was before spools were common), and, as was my custom, put it over the back of a chair. More gallant and thoughtful, _apparently_, than his older companions, this young gentleman insisted upon holding it for me to wind. For some reason--_perfectly unaccountable_, if one judged only by his quiet, innocent face, without watching the eyes and mouth--that skein became as intricately tangled as if tied by Macbeth's witches. "'A badly tangled skein is it not?' said he, when I had lost half my evening in getting it wound.