So Keith looked forward to the time when he should be needed by New York and by other cities. And he studied hard. But he played hard, too. The students were a lawless set, and drunkenness and religious infidelity were rival methods for distressing their teachers. Up at New Haven the Yale boys in a certain class, feeling themselves wronged by a certain professor, had disguised themselves as Indians and with long knives whittled all the study benches into shavings while the terrified instructor cowered on his throne and watched. Vice of every sort seemed to be the chief study of such of the students as were not aiming at the ministry. As one of the college graduates wrote: “Hot suppers, midnight carousals were too frequent with us and sowed the seed of a vice that in a few years carried off a fearful proportion of our members to an untimely grave.” There was grave anxiety for the morals of the whole nation. The city was growing too fast. By 1850 it had passed the half-million mark! The churches were not numerous enough to hold a quarter of the population, yet most of them were sparsely attended. The American home was collapsing. Dr. Chirnside preached on the exalted cost of living, and stated that church weddings were on the decrease. The hotel was ruining the family. Rents were so exorbitant, servants so scarce and incompetent, that people were giving up the domesticity of the good old days. Business detained the husband downtown, and he took his midday dinner at Sweeny’s or Delmonico’s, where he could have poultry or sirloin steak for a shilling and sixpence. And his wife and daughters, unwilling to eat alone, went to Weller’s or Taylor’s and had a fricandeau, an ice, or a meringue. Ladies’ saloons were numerous and magnificent and wives could buy ready-made meals there; so they forgot how to cook. The care of children no longer concerned them. Women were losing all the retiring charm that had hitherto given them their divine power over men. The clergy bewailed the approaching collapse of a nation that had forgotten God—or had never remembered him. There was a movement afoot to amend the Constitution with an acknowledgment of the Deity and “take the stain of atheism from that all-important document.” These were the Sunday thoughts. In contrast were the Fourth of July thoughts, when the country sang its own hallelujahs and, like another deity, contentedly meditated its own perfections. On these occasions every American man was better than any foreigner, and American women were all saints. And there were the Election Day moods, when the country split up into parties for a few weeks, and played tennis with mutual charges of corruption, thievery, treason. Then there was Christmas, when everybody loved everybody; and New Year’s Day, when everybody called on everybody and got a little drunk on good wishes and the toasts that went with them.