Friends thought
he should be well satisfied when he was sent to live with his
grandfather at Hartford and apprenticed to the law; but John Ledyard
hated the pettifogging of the law, hated roofed-over, walled-in life,
wanted the kind of life where men do things, not just dicker, and
philosophize, and compromise over the fag-ends of things other men have
done. At twenty-one years of age, without any of the prospects that
lure the prudent soul, he threw over all idea of law.[1]
Friends were aghast. Manifestly, the boy had {244} brains. He
devoured information, absorbed facts like an encyclopaedia, and
observed everything. The Greek Testament and Ovid were his companions;
yet he rebelled at the immured existence of the scholar. At that time
(1772), Dartmouth was the rendezvous of {245} missionaries to the
Indians. The college itself held lectures to the singing of the winds
through the forests around it. The blowing of a conch-shell called to
lessons; and a sort of wildwood piety pervaded the atmosphere. Urged
by his mother, Ledyard made one more honest attempt to fit his life to
a stereotyped form, and came to study at Dartmouth for the missionary's
career.
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