This most ingenuous request must have amused the gentleman of whom it was made; but it proved to be effectual. Prescott was required to attend all the mathematical exercises conscientiously, but from that day he was never called upon to recite. For the rest, his diligence in those studies which he really liked won him the respect of the faculty at large. At graduation he received as a commencement honour the assignment of a Latin poem, which he duly declaimed to a crowded audience in the old "meeting-house" at Cambridge, in August, 1814. This poem was in Latin elegiacs, and was an apostrophe to Hope (_Ad Spem_), of which, unfortunately, no copy has been preserved. At the same time, Prescott was admitted to membership in the Phi Beta Kappa, from which a single blackball was sufficient to exclude a candidate. His father celebrated these double honours by giving an elaborate dinner, in a pavilion, to more than five hundred of the family's acquaintances. Prescott had now to make his choice of a profession; for to a New Englander of those days every man, however wealthy, was expected to have a definite occupation. Very naturally he decided upon the law, and began the study of it in his father's office, though it was evident enough from the first that to his taste the tomes of Blackstone made no very strong appeal. He loved rather to go back to his classical reading and to enlarge his knowledge of modern literature. Indeed, his legal studies were treated rather cavalierly, and it is certain that had he ever been admitted to the bar, he would have found no pleasure in the routine of a lawyer's practice. Fate once more intervened, though, as before, in an unpleasant guise. In January, 1815, a painful inflammation appeared in his right eye--the one that had not been injured. This inflammation increased so rapidly as to leave Prescott for the time completely blind. Nor was the disorder merely local. A fever set in with a high pulse and a general disturbance of the system. Prescott's suffering was intense for several days; and at the end of a week, when the local inflammation had passed away, the retina of the right eye was found to be so seriously affected as to threaten a permanent loss of sight. At the same time, symptoms of acute rheumatism appeared in the knee-joints and in the neck. For several months the patient's condition was pitiable. Again and again there was a recurrence of the inflammation in the eye, alternating with the rheumatic symptoms, so that for sixteen weeks Prescott was unable to leave his room, which had to be darkened almost into blackness. Medical skill availed very little, and no doubt the copious blood-letting which was demanded by the practice of that time served only to deplete the patient's strength. Through all these weary months, however, Prescott bore his sufferings with indomitable courage, and to those friends of his who groped their way through the darkness to