Trinity has since changed its abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in those days a famous Methodist divine and journalist described it as "a college with a few buildings that look like tobacco barns and a few teachers that look as though they ought to be worming tobacco." Page spent something more than a year at Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving in December, 1872.

A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely more complimentary than the judgment passed above.

They show that the young man was very unhappy.

One long letter to his mother is nothing but a boyish diatribe against the place.

"I do not care a horse apple for Trinity's distinction," he writes, and then he gives the reasons for this juvenile contempt.