Weak eyes compelled him to leave the Latin School for a farm in Michigan. Not gaining all the relief desired, he then went for a year into a store, and thence proceeded to finish his preparation for college at a military school; from which he wrote, “You can’t do me a greater favor than to write me on religious topics. I have no religious society here, and, strange as it may seem, my interest in religion has increased daily since I came. My confidence in Christ is becoming stronger and stronger. I was firmly convinced, before I came here, that he would deliver me from evil, and I am more and more persuaded of it. I can’t tell you how much religious happiness I have got from the very worldliness of the school influences. Place a plant in a hot-house till it has had the opportunity to become delicate; then expose it to the chilling winds of heaven: and if it can straighten up and resist them, you know that there is a real healthy, independent life in it. That is the feeling I have had here. I am getting on nicely, and like the school better every day, and have come to the conclusion that they are a very nice set of fellows, after all. It takes a great while to get acquainted though; I find that I have been on trial all this time. They have now about concluded to trust me; so I find them much more agreeable. You would be surprised to hear several of the hardest fellows in school, who scarcely ever stop swearing, tell me that they would be glad to change places with me. Several have said so, and that entirely of their own accord, introducing the subject themselves. My chum told me that ‘I had a great many advantages;’--in having taken a decided stand as a Christian, he meant. He told me that he had sat up in our room, with his legs out of the window, looking down to the ground, and thinking, to use his own language, ‘how soon he would be in hell if he dropped out.’ He added, that once, in a skirmish in Western Virginia, the bullets were flying pretty thick, and he thought that he was going to die, and that he would recognize his Maker in death, if he had not in life; and he ran over ‘Now I lay me,’ in his mind. I have heard him confess that he did not know the Lord’s Prayer. Think what a life he must have led since he was twelve years old, when he ran away from home, and went down the Mississippi as far as New Orleans in the position of assistant bar-keeper. ‘But then,’ said he, ‘you know I hate to be called pious.’ I wonder how many souls have been lost through that fear! “‘You think I’m a pretty hard case--don’t you, fellows?’ said another, to a little collection of boys yesterday morning. ‘I might be reformed, now, I tell you.’ They asked me whether I thought it was necessary for a man to be religious? I said I thought we were made for religion, and felt unsatisfied all the time without it.