According to her narrative, he manifested no fondness for books, and made little progress in learning till about seven years of age. At that period she placed in his hands Goldsmith's _Animated Nature_. He was delighted with its perusal, and she never found it necessary to stimulate his thirst for knowledge afterwards. His preparatory course was taken in his native town of New Bern, and at the age of fifteen he entered Yale College. There he passed through the studies of the freshman and the sophomore classes, when his education, so far as it depended on schools, was brought to a close. A relative, a man of fortune, at the North, who had hitherto furnished the means for his college expenses (his own patrimony being wholly insufficient), and from whose bounty he had hoped to pass on to graduation, suddenly withdrew his support and left him to his own exertions. Of the motives of this unexpected arrest in his college career, on which so much might have depended, it is useless, now at least, to speculate or inquire. But it will be a source of gratification to his friends to be assured that it was attributable to no demerit in our student. True, his contemporaries at Yale differ widely in their estimation of his capacities while there. The Northern students, who belonged to a different society, regarded him as a frolicsome youth, averse to mathematics, and fond of novel-reading, who gave no indications of superior endowments. On the other hand, a college classmate (Thomas P. Devereux, Esq., of Halifax) and member of the same society, who knew him intimately throughout life, and was five and twenty years associated with him at the bar, affirms that "he was beyond dispute the first boy of his class, composed of seventy individuals, many of them afterwards distinguished men." He was not, says this friend, "a hard student of the prescribed course. Perhaps I ought to add that he was remiss in his college duties, but he was eager for information to a most wonderful degree, and among his fellow-students he exhibited the same intellectual superiority we have seen him so steadily maintain among men." To the same source I am indebted for the following observations concerning his elocution, which I repeat for the advantage and encouragement of the young. "I think," he remarks, "that the thousands who listened to the fluency with which Mr. Badger spoke, the clearness of his enunciation, the exact accuracy of his sentences and the carefulness of their formation--the right words always in the right places--will be surprised to learn that in his youthful attempts in debate he was almost a stammerer. I have heard him say he owed exemption from downright stuttering to his father, whom he remembered with affection, though under five years of age at the time of his decease, who would not permit him to speak while he hesitated in the least, but required him to stand by his side perfectly silent, until he had collected himself and arranged his thoughts.