At this institution were assembled the sons of most of the citizens of eastern North Carolina, and of the bordering counties of Virginia, who aspired to a liberal education. And here were formed friendships which he cherished with great satisfaction throughout life. Among his companions were the late Robert Broadnax, of Rockingham, subsequently a planter of large possessions on Dan River, among the most estimable gentlemen of his time; and Cadwallader Jones, then of Halifax, but afterwards of Orange, an officer at different periods in the navy and in the army of the United States, a successful planter, and a model of the manners and virtues which give a charm to social intercourse. Here, too, he found Weldon N. Edwards, of Warren, subsequently distinguished by much public service in Congress and under the government of the State, thenceforward his lifelong friend, with whom the bonds of amity seemed to be drawn more closely as others of his contemporaries dropped from around him. Of these four youths of the Warrenton Academy, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mr. Edwards alone survives. Long may he live to enjoy the veneration and respect due to a life of probity, honor, and usefulness. From the Warrenton Academy young Ruffin was transferred to the College of Nassau Hall, at Princeton, New Jersey. It is believed that his father, who was a deeply pious man, was controlled in the selection of this college in preference to that of William and Mary, in Virginia (next to Harvard University the oldest institution of learning in the United States), not only by a desire to guard his son's health, which had suffered from the malaria of tide-water Virginia, but to secure him as well against the temptations incident to college life in an institution where, as he supposed, the discipline was too lax for the sons of affluence who matriculated there. He entered the freshman class at Princeton, and graduated at the commencement in 1805, the sixteenth in a class of forty-two members, "being the first of the second division of intermediate honors." The late Governor James Iredell, of North Carolina, was in the class succeeding his own, and for nearly the whole of his college course his room-mate. Thus commenced a friendship between these gentlemen in youth which was terminated only by the death of Mr. Iredell. Among others of his college associates who became distinguished in subsequent life, there were Samuel L. Southard and Theodore Frelinghuysen, of New Jersey, Joseph R. Ingersoll, of Philadelphia, the Cuthberts and Habershams, of Georgia, Christopher Hughes of Maryland, and Stephenson Archer, of Mississippi.