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114 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS the school founded by Alexander Campbell^ the founder of the church variously known as the Disciples, the Church of Christ, and the Campbellites. There he took the junior and senior courses in one year and on the senior year's work made the re- markable average grade of ninety-nine and eight-ninths. When it is known that Clark arrived at Bethany with one hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, and that on that sum he managed to eke out an existence through the entire year, I believe few will dispute the statement that this high-water mark in scholarship constitutes one of the greatest single achievements of an individual within our times. Two of his classmates there related to me how Clark would begin study at daylight or earlier and work steadily until midnight. To save time for his studies he absented himself from chapel until ordered to attend, whereupon he appeared with shaved head. This disturbed the services to such an extent that he was ex- cused thereafter and he went back victoriously to his garret and his crust and his desperate battle to secure an education. But to him it was, withal, a cheerful battle. He learned to do logarithms and figure eclipses and became proficient in the languages. He sang Greek songs while cooking his combeef and cabbage, wearing a gunny sack in Ueu of an apron, and wrote odes in imitation of Horace. The remarkable scholarship shown by Clark at Bethany secured for him at the age of twenty-three the presidency of Marshall College, the State Normal School at Huntington, West Virginia. For many years after that he held the record as the youngest college president in the country, if not in the world. In making application for the presi- dency of Marshall College, Clark wrote this description of himself : * * I am twenty-two years old, a Kentuckian by birth, a Democrat in politics, a Campbellite in religion, unmarried, a master mason, six feet two in height and weigh 170 pounds. ' ' He now weighs 235, but all the changes of forty years that have passed have not altered his habit of direct, forceful, un- evasive statement. After having fought his way up in pol- itics from the lowly position of city attorney in a small town