After leaving college young Blaine started for Kentucky to carve out his own fortune. He went to Blue Lick Springs and became a professor in the Western Military Institute, in which there were about four hundred and fifty boys. A retired officer who was a student there at the time relates that Professor Blaine was a thin, handsome, earnest young man, with the same fascinating manners he has now. He was popular with the boys, who trusted him and made friends with him from the first. He knew the given name of every one, and he knew his shortcomings and his strong points. He was a man of great personal courage, and during a fight between the faculty of the school and the owners of the springs, involving some questions about the removal of the school, he behaved in the bravest manner, fighting hard but keeping cool. Revolvers and knives were freely used, but Blaine only used his well-disciplined muscle. Colonel Thornton F. Johnson was the principal of the school, and his wife had a young ladies' school at Millersburg, twenty miles distant. There Blaine met Miss Harriet Stanwood, who subsequently became his wife. She was a Maine girl of excellent family sent to Kentucky to be educated. After teaching for a while Blaine left Kentucky and went to Philadelphia to study law. While there he taught for a short time at the blind asylum and also wrote for the newspapers. He soon, however, was irresistibly attracted to the State of Maine, and left his native State for a home in the community with which his name is now indissolubly connected. It is somewhat remarkable that this ambitious young man should have gone East instead of West, choosing a State which the young men were fast leaving--one whose population in the last forty years has increased very little. He is, indeed, almost the only man who has gone East in the last half-century and risen to any prominence. Mr. Blaine went to Maine in 1853, and soon afterward married Miss Stanwood, whose family are well known in New England. Through their influence he soon found an occupation in journalism, and until 1860 was actively engaged in editing at different times the Kennebec Journal and the Portland Daily Advertiser. He retained a part ownership in the Kennebec Journal until it began to hamper him in his political career, and then he sold out. A friend has said of him as a journalist: "I have often thought that a great editor, as great perhaps as Horace Greeley, was lost when Mr. Blaine went into politics. He possesses all the qualities of a great journalist: he has a phenomenal memory; he remembers circumstances, dates, names, and places more readily than any other man I ever met."