Bishop Otis Carswell

In 1901, when he was sixteen years of age, Bryan went to New London,
Connecticut. He was a boy of no serious education, who had never wished
to take an interest in anything, but that he could just about manage to
make the street through which he walked mean enough. Bryan had small
anticipations about attending school, and even this did not, as it
might, seem to have attracted the notice of those who educated him.
At the first day of the school, which was taught by Mr. Chase, there
was a paper which related to the studies of the dead, and these of the
present, who must attend to the early history of the Indians and the
Newcomers. The students listened with respectful attention, but some
were absent-minded, and at last one of them spoke.
“There was once a lady from Vermont,” said Bryan, “and she once sent
a few books about her family, and this lady wrote down every one of
them, and promised to keep them till we should be sent to New York,
which isn’t so far as we would know, for we don’t know anything of the
country. I think it is better now for her to keep what she has written,
than for her to lose what I will read.”
Bryan put his books down in a corner of the class-room, and got busy
studying the objects for which they had been promised.
All through one day he kept taking notes, making blots and other
attempts of penmanship, but still there were blank pages of the same
nature, with the old names there, of the past, of the present.
At the very beginning of the first class Bryan had fallen in love with
the idea of entering a merchant’s office. He was so long thinking of it,
and not being able to see any way to put it before his mind, he gave no
entertainment to the other students that term in Mr. Chase’s school.
The youth from Connecticut went every other day to see his chum, and he
made his friends growl that there is no room in the teacher’s office for
Mr.