About this time he entered the Old Kokomo Normal, an educational institution much superior to most of the Indiana schools of that period. The building, a commodious one, had been erected several years before by the people of Kokomo and the surrounding country with the view to giving their children the advantage of training in the elements of higher learning and to fit them for teaching in the public schools. The head of the school at the time was Prof. E. N. Fay, a college graduate and a man of scholarly attainments, and he had surrounded himself with a competent corps of assistants. While attending the Normal young Kern lived at his home in Alto, riding his horse to Kokomo in the morning and returning in the evening. For the sake of economy he took his lunch with him. The six-mile stretch of mud road between his home and the county seat was impassable during much of the winter except on horseback. In zero weather the ambitious youth suffered severely, but having developed the habit of declaiming his lessons, and making speeches to his nag during these trips, he managed to neutralize the effect of the weather by vigorous gesticulation and an unsparing exercise of his lungs. At the Normal young Kern is described by Mr. Morrow as “a brilliant scholar but not a plodder.” He seemed to absorb the matter of the textbooks without effort. “In the study of English Grammar he particularly excelled,” writes Morrow. “He studied language not to get its dull formulas, but to know how most forcibly and clearly to express his thoughts.” It was during his Normal days that Kern determined definitely upon the study of law. While Doctor Kern would have defrayed the expenses of his son’s legal education, the latter was of an independent nature and preferred to pay his own way. With the view to making the money required for a course of legal instructions in a university, he took the examination for a teacher’s license before he was sixteen, and while the examination was conducted by Rawson Vaile, a graduate of Amherst College and a stickler for thoroughness, he made a very high grade and was granted a twenty-four months’ license, which was the highest permissible by the county examiner. Here enters the pedagogue. III