He made the drug-store a success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek and mathematics in every spare hour he had--getting up at five in the morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole day.

His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an Oxford graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the University with three scholarships.

These were sufficient to carry him through in three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the drug-business he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his younger brothers, while he took honours at the University.
There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last by the Bursar of his college to reorganize the commissariat, which he did with such success that the college saved five thousand dollars a year.

He had genius, the college people said, and after he had taken his degree with honours in classics and mathematics they offered him a professorship at two thousand dollars a year.
He laughed ironically, but yet with satisfaction, when the professorship was offered.

It was all so different from what was in his mind for the future.