I studied a number of complicated technical subjects—perspective and mechanical drawing and surveying—though now, thirty years later, I could not survey my front porch. I studied mathematics, from simple addition to differential calculus. The addition I still remember; but if I were asked to do the simplest problem in algebra I should not have an idea how to set about it. I remember with vividness the men who put me through these various torments; young men, some feeble, some impatient, but always uninterested in what they were doing; old men, kind and lovable, or irritable and angry, but all of them hopeless so far as concerned the task of teaching anybody anything of any use. Every morning we spent half an hour in what was called “chapel,” and the old men, the members of the faculty, were lined up on the platform, and remain to this hour the most vivid line of human faces stored in my memory. It was their duty to listen to student oratory; and so perfect had been the discipline of their lives that they were able to sit without moving a muscle, or giving the least sign of what they must have felt. Sooner or later we came into the class-rooms of these old men, and each in turn did what he could for us. I remember the professor of German, lovable, genial, highly cultured. During the two years that I studied with him, I learned perhaps two hundred words—certainly no more than I could have learned in two days of active study under an intelligent system. Little things he taught me that were not in the course, for example by a slight frown when he saw me trimming my finger-nails in class. And then the professor of Greek, a white-whiskered old terror. For three years he had me five hours per week, and today I could not read a sentence from a child’s primer in Greek, though I still know the letters and the sounds. I suppose there are Greek words which I have looked up in the dictionary a thousand times, yet it never occurred to any human being to point out to me that I might save time and trouble by learning the meaning of the words once for all. I marvel when I realize that it was possible for me to read “The Acharnians” of Aristophanes, line by line, and hardly once get a smile out of it, nor have it occur to me that there was any resemblance between what happened in that play, and the fight against Tammany Hall and the Hearst newspapers which was going on in the world about me.