Of the names mentioned in this letter, that of Isaac Stuart is not unknown to fame. Joseph Jenkins afterwards became Willis’s brother-in-law, marrying his sister Mary in 1831. He was from Boston, and was graduated at Yale the year after Willis. CHAPTER II. 1823-1827. COLLEGE LIFE. In the fall of 1823, Willis entered Yale. Commencement was then held in September and first term opened late in October. College life left a more enduring impress upon Willis than upon almost any other American writer. It furnished him with a fund of literary material. It brought him into the sunshine, and changed the homely school-boy chrysalis into a butterfly of uncommon splendor and spread of wing. During freshman year he lodged in the family of Mr. Townsend, opposite South College, with other members of the Andover contingent. One of these was Henry Durant, who was Willis’s chum all through the four years of the course. He was a serious-minded lad, a hard student, who took high rank in the appointment list, and his influence over his less steady room-mate was always for good. He became in time the founder and first president of the University of California, and a man of wide influence in educational and religious matters on the Pacific coast. Among Willis’s other intimates in his own class were Joseph H. Towne, also a Boston boy, and afterwards a doctor of divinity; and “Bob” Richards, of New York, who took him home with him in vacations, and introduced him to the gayeties of the metropolis. Class lines were not drawn very sharply then, and one of his best friends in college was George J. Pumpelly of Owego, New York. Their friendship was continued or resumed in later life, when Willis bought from Pumpelly the little domain of Glenmary; and settled in his neighborhood on Owego Creek. Next after Willis himself, the most distinguished member of the class of 1827 was Horace Bushnell. In senior year the two roomed in the same hall--the north entry of North College; and in 1848, on the occasion of Bushnell’s preaching a sermon at Boston to the Unitarians, which excited much public comment, Willis gave some reminiscences of his quondam classmate in the “Home Journal,” telling, among other things, how Bushnell once came into his room and taught him how to hone a razor. He described him as a “black-haired, earnest-eyed, sturdy, carelessly dressed, athletic, and independent good fellow, popular in spite of being both blunt and exemplary.” Bushnell was a leader in his class; Willis decidedly not. They belonged to different sets, and there was little in common between the elegant young poet and ladies’ man and the rough, strong farmer lad from the Litchfield hills. They met once more in after years,--in 1845, on the Rhine, both in pursuit of health.