In intercollegiate athletics Amherst stood well. It won its share of trophies on the diamond, the gridiron and the track, but it did not engage in any of the water sports. The games with Williams and Dartmouth aroused the keenest interest, and honors were then about even. But these outside activities were kept well within bounds and were not permitted to interfere with the real work of the college. Pratt Field had just been completed and was well equipped for outdoor sports, while Pratt Gymnasium had every facility for indoor training. These places were well named, for the Pratt boys were very active in athletics. One of them was usually captain of the football team. I remember that in 1892 George D. Pratt, afterwards Conservation Commissioner of the State of New York, led his team to victory against Dartmouth, thirty to two, and a week later kicked ten straight goals in a gale of wind at the championship game with Williams, leaving the score sixty to nothing in favor of Amherst. But both these colleges have since retaliated with a great deal of success. In these field events I was only an observer, contenting myself with getting exercise by faithful attendance at the class drills in the gymnasium. In these the entire class worked together with dumbbells for most of the time, but they involved sufficient marching about the floor to give a military flavor which I found very useful in later life when I came in contact with military affairs during my public career. The Presidential election of 1892 came in my sophomore year. I favored the renomination of Harrison and joined the Republican Club of the college, which participated in a torch-light parade, but the unsatisfactory business condition of the country carried the victory to Cleveland. For nearly two years I continued my studies of Latin and Greek. Ours was the last class that read Demosthenes on the Crown with Professor William S. Tyler, the head of the Greek department, who had been with the college about sixty years. He was a patriarch in appearance with a long beard and flowing white hair. His reverence for the ancient Greeks approached a religion. It was illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, that one of his sons was sent to a theological school, and not wishing to engage in the ministry, wrote his father that the faculty of the school held that Socrates was in hell. Such a reflection on the Greek philosopher so outraged the old man’s loyalty that he wrote his son that the school was no place for him and directed him to come home at once. In spite of his eighty-odd years he put the fire of youth into the translation of those glowing periods of the master orator, which were such eloquent appeals to the patriotism of the Greeks and such tremendous efforts to rouse them to the defense of their country. Those passages of the marvelous oration he said he had loved to read during the Civil War.