My friend William Scott was there, the young husband of my cousin, Louise Hoyt; a neatly-dressed young fellow, who looked on me as an untamed animal just caught in the far West--"fit food for gunpowder," and good for nothing else.
About June 12th I embarked in the steamer Cornelius Vanderbilt for West Point; registered in the office of Lieutenant C.F.

Smith, Adjutant of the Military Academy, as a new cadet of the class of 1836, and at once became installed as the "plebe" of my fellow-townsman, William Irvin, then entering his Third Class.
Colonel R.E.De Russy was Superintendent; Major John Fowle, Sixth United States Infantry, Commandant.

The principal Professors were: Mahan, Engineering; Bartlett, Natural Philosophy; Bailey, Chemistry; Church, Mathematics; Weir, Drawing; and Berard, French.
The routine of military training and of instruction was then fully established, and has remained almost the same ever since.

To give a mere outline would swell this to an inconvenient size, and I therefore merely state that I went through the regular course of four years, graduating in June, 1840, number six in a class of forty-three.

These forty-three were all that remained of more than one hundred which originally constituted the class.