Longfellow's salary at Bowdoin College was eight hundred dollars, as professor of modern languages, with an additional hundred as librarian. From the beginning he took the lead among American teachers in this department, the difficulty among these being that they consisted of two classes,--Americans imperfectly acquainted with Europe and foreigners as imperfectly known in America. Even in the selection of mere tutors the same trouble always existed, though partially diminished, as time went on, by those refugees from revolutionary excitements in Europe, especially from Germany and Italy, who were a real addition to our university circles. Even these were from their very conditions of arrival a somewhat impetuous and unmanageable class, and in American colleges--as later during the Civil War in the American army--the very circumstances of their training made them sometimes hard to control as subordinates. It was very fortunate, when they found, as in Longfellow, a well-trained American who could be placed over their heads. There were also text-books and readers to be prepared and edited by the young professor, one of which, as I well remember, was of immense value to students, the "Proverbes Dramatiques," already mentioned, a collection of simple and readable plays, written in colloquial French, and a most valuable substitute for the previous Racine and Corneille, the use of which was like teaching classes to read out of Shakespeare. Thus full of simple and congenial work, Longfellow went to housekeeping with his young wife in a house still attractive under its rural elms, and thus described by him:-- "June 23 [1831]. I can almost fancy myself in Spain, the morning is so soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild brier and the mock orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun." {15 _Every Other Saturday_, i. 20.} CHAPTER VII THE CORNER STONE LAID