“At the time I was at school at Hiram, Principal Garfield was a great reader, not omnivorous, but methodical, and in certain lines. He was the most industrious man I ever knew or heard of. At one time he delivered lectures on geology, held public debates on spiritualism, preached on Sunday, conducted the recitations of five or six classes every day, attended to all the financial affairs of the school, was an active member of the legislature, and studied law to be admitted to the bar. He has often said that he never could have performed this labor if it had not been for the assistance of two gifted and earnest women,—Mrs. Garfield herself, his early schoolmate, who had followed her husband in his studies; and Miss Almeda A. Booth, a member of the faculty. The latter was a graduate of Oberlin, and had been a teacher of young Garfield when he was a pupil; and now that he had returned as head of the faculty, she continued to serve him in a sort of motherly way as tutor and guide. When Garfield had speeches to make in the legislature or on the stump, or lectures to deliver, these two ladies ransacked the library by day, and collected facts and marked books for his digestion and use in the preparation of the discourses at night.” In the canvass of 1877, after one of his powerful stump speeches, Garfield was lying on the grass, talking to an old friend of these Hiram days. Said he: “I have taken more solid comfort in the thing itself, and received more moral recompense and stimulus in after-life from capturing young men for an education than from any thing else in the world.”