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79 11 Hoyt’s School Ithink it was at about the end of my twelfth year [in 1847] that the school enterprise of Mr. Weld ended. He may have had a call to some church or other, but at all events, Syracuse was once more without an “academy.” Several gentlemen who were encumbered with boys took the matter up and decided to have a first-class select school—very select—of their own. The number of students was at first limited to sixteen, but afterwards three or four additional fortunates were grudgingly admitted. The basement of the Congregational Church, opposite the Park, was obtained for the schoolroom and was neatly fitted up with desks and benches. They were exceedingly fortunate in their selection of a teacher. He was a tall, handsome, pleasant-mannered young man, named Hoyt, and a more skillful instructor for such boys as we were it would be hard to find. From the very beginning, he enforced upon us the idea that we were distinctively “young gentlemen” and that we must never say or do or think anything ungentlemanly. Any boy who could not or would not live up to that hard rule had only one thing before him. He might expect to gather up his books and walk out of the schoolroom as a fellow who was unfit to be in it. At the same time, Mr. Hoyt possessed a rare talent for getting young brains at work to the best advantage. He did his whole duty by us and made his mark upon every one of us. It is my opinion that the remarkable record of the boys of that school, selected material as they were, was largely due to the stimulus and direction which they received while under his care. I can sit at my desk now, and look around that schoolroom and I cannot find one failure in it. Yonder, in front, is our star boy, Andrew D. White, 80 hoyt’s school foreign minister and educator.1 Just behind him are sitting three successful leading editors. There is a notably skillful surgeon. Across from him is a United States District Court judge. There are two army colonels. There is a prime good preacher. The rest are businessmen, lawyers, authors, and so forth, and among them all is but one hard case. He began brightly but he did not end well. I must sadly correct my assertion, for he, with fine abilities, was a failure, because he rejected the wise counsels of Mr. Hoyt and forgot to be a gentleman, for the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments were made to us the fundamental thing in the idea we were to form of what might become a gentleman. One of our lines of instruction, from the first, was in journalism, and our Saturday elocutionary exercises were varied by “compositions” and weekly journals, prepared, edited, and read by ourselves, each periodical having but one editor. The name of my own was The Frolic Manual, wherever I found such a name, and I obtained printed heads for it at a newspaper office. Immediately my invention was stolen, for the other editors went to the printers also. What made my own enterprise peculiar and somewhat celebrated as well as made fun of, was the fact that I was beginning to manufacture verses and each week found one or more strictly original poems in the columns of the Manual, to be read before the school by the unabashed author. By the way, our select school was considered to be a “Park Boys” affair, no matter what part of the village any member might come from, and it was a rival, somewhat at war, of the Parochial School of St. Paul’s Church, of which we formed a poor opinion for it did not have any periodical press. Our Saturday exercises were a great affair and were attended by our mothers and our sisters and our cousins and our aunts to an extent which turned them into a kind of social gathering and made us think very well of ourselves. Our games, ball and races, and wrestlings and so forth, were much the same as those of all other schoolboys everywhere, and I discovered that my somewhat peculiar physical education, as cowboy, boatman, and sportsman, had developed in me an unusual degree of toughness. No boy of my own size in the school could throw me and my running jump was as good as any other...

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