Mr. Kellogg got through with the Academy, and entered Bowdoin College in 1836. It is worthy of note that in all his long life he never shuffled off the boy. It was not a mere memory on his part that he once was a boy. The genuine boy was never a memory with him, but was always a present reality. In one sense he was as young at eighty as he was at eighteen. Boys were his mates always. There are men who, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, never grow old, and Mr. Kellogg was one of them. To the very last his lips would smile and his eyes would twinkle as he recalled some prank of his boyhood or told tales of those who had been his companions on the ship and on the farm and in the school. He never forgot a friend, and he certainly never forgot a funny or laughable incident. His own perennial boyhood has cheered and made more noble an almost numberless band of young lives throughout the country, and may the time be long before the young people of the land shall cease to read his wholesome books.
It was in 1836, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, that Elijah Kellogg entered Bowdoin College as a Freshman. His father had been one of the earliest and firmest friends of the college. As one of the Cumberland County Association of Ministers he had joined in the petition to the General Court of Massachusetts for the establishment of a collegiate institution in the province of Maine. When in answer to the petition of the ministers, and of the Court of Sessions of Cumberland County, the college was incorporated in 1794, Mr. Kellogg was named as one of the first board of overseers. Four years later he became a trustee, and continued to hold that official relation to the college until 1824. During his boyhood, therefore, and before he cherished any purpose or desire to enjoy its privileges, Elijah must have heard, within the family circle, much about the college which was so great an object of interest and pride to his father, as it was, indeed, to the whole community. It was but natural, therefore, when his purpose was seriously formed to seek a college training in preparation for his father’s calling of the ministry, that Bowdoin, aside from its proximity to his home, should be the college of his choice. But his course collegeward was interrupted and delayed by various circumstances, and particularly by personal tastes that were quite other than scholastic. Always a lover of the sea, and delighting in the tales of sea life and adventure to which he listened from the lips of sailors themselves along the Portland wharves, it is not strange that the call of the sea sounded louder than any other in his ears. So, listening to the call, he shipped before the mast, and for three years lived the hard and perilous life of a sailor. It is true that the experience, which may have been useful to him in other ways also, was an admirable preparation for the brilliant service which he afterwards performed as chaplain of the Sailor’s Home in Boston, but in the meantime it made him late in entering upon his college life. It is to be said, however, that of his thirty classmates six were as old as himself.