After the death of his father in 1883, his mother remarried to Dr. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, who served as president of the Association of American Physicians.

[4] As retold in his 1939 memoir Fragments from Babel, he ran away with another boy from their families in New York to a gypsy camp near Newark, New Jersey, where they spent three days and were accepted because of his proficiency in their language.

[6] Prince entered New Jersey politics, using his language skills to reach out to various ethnic groups of constituents in their native tongues.

[3][4] While serving as Acting Governor, Prince found an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript in the state archives containing a list of Delaware-based trade jargon.

Prince analyzed the word list in a 1912 article in American Anthropologist entitled "An Ancient New Jersey Indian Jargon.

"[7] Prince served as president of the New Jersey Civil Service Commission from 1917 to 1921, when he was chosen by Warren G. Harding to be Minister to Denmark.