This was the wife that Garfield selected, and he found her indeed a helper and a sympathizer in all his sorrows and joys. She has proved equal to any position to which the rising fame of her husband lifted her. Less than a year ago her husband said of her: "I have been wonderfully blessed in the discretion of my wife. She is one of the coolest and best-balanced women I ever saw. She is unstampedable. There has not been one solitary instance in my public career when I suffered in the smallest degree for any remark she ever made. It would have been perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be misinterpreted; but, without any design, and with the intelligence and coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that I ever heard of. With the competition that has been against me, such discretion has been a real blessing." Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands. But as James A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and sympathetic companion and helpmeet. They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the college campus; and so their wedded life began. It was a modest home, but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted. As President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of Hiram College, to his family. Greatness has its penalties, and a low estate its compensations. 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: