With graduation came separation. The favorite walks around Williamstown were taken for the last time. The last farewells were said, the last grasp of the hand given, and Garfield turned his face toward his Ohio home. He was at once elected instructor in the ancient languages at the Western Eclectic Institute, later known as Hiram College. Two years later he became president of this institution, overrun with its four hundred pupils. The activities of the man during this period were immense. Following his own ideas of teaching, he surcharged the institution with his personality. The younger student, on entering, _felt_ the busy life which animated the place. With his teaching, Garfield kept up an enormous amount of outside reading; he delivered lectures on scientific and miscellaneous subjects, making some money by it; he engaged in public debates on theologic and scientific questions; he took the stump for the Republican party; on Sundays he preached in the Disciples Church; in 1857 he took up the study of the law, mastered its fundamental principles, and was admitted to practice at the Cleveland bar on a certificate of two years’ study. Yet with all this load on him, he impressed himself on each pupil in Hiram College as a personal friend. One of these, Rev. J. L. Darsie, gives a vivid picture of Garfield at this time: “I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me, and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor and was janitor of the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil at the same school. He was full of animal spirits, and he used to run out on the green almost every day and play cricket with us. He was a tall, strong man, but dreadfully awkward. Every now and then he would get a hit on the nose, and he muffed his ball and lost his hat as a regular thing. He was left-handed, too, and that made him seem all the clumsier. But he was most powerful and very quick, and it was easy for us to understand how it was that he had acquired the reputation of whipping all the other mule-drivers on the canal, and of making himself the hero of that thoroughfare when he followed its tow-path ten years earlier.