“I have been watching your work,” said the professor, kindly, “and

think that you might try for the junior essay prize and also for the

prize offered for the best piece of college fiction. I have been

advising several others in the class to compete, and hope that you will

find time for the work. These prize competitions are real tests as to

the value of classroom work. I hope you and the others will try!”

On account of the professor’s kindly suggestion, I began to work on

the essay and the story, and kept my typewriter clattering hour after

hour when not in class. For all the lure of authorship was before me.

The lure of substantial prizes. The lure of contest. The lure of doing

something, in composition, that seemed _real_.

When I entered upon this special literary adventure I found that I

was part of a considerable fellowship, whose interest in the work was

kept alive by the wise, far-seeing, personal interest of our different

literary instructors. I found one student who confidentially informed

me that he was making a special research in the library concerning

some wild, unknown pirates who once infested the New England coast. He

meant to write at length upon that subject for the gratification of his

own literary curiosity. Another student was busy, like the youthful

Stevenson, in imitating, deliberately, the styles of the world-famous

authors, and just then, on our first acquaintance, was in the wild

morals, but cameo-cut phrases of Maupassant!

By the end of spring, in fact, I found myself in as inspiring a

literary atmosphere as, probably, ever an undergraduate experienced.

For I had been made a member of the editorial board of the college

magazine, and even wrote comic doggerel and attempts at descriptive

wit for the now thoroughly established comic monthly. I have been in a

magazine board meeting, held in a student’s room, when the conversation

would rise into debatable heights, and would excite the whole company,

over such questions as:

“Are there more than seven types of plot possible in fiction?”

“Is the supernatural in Shakespere scientific?”

“Was Poe a plagiarist?”

“Will any of the present-day six best sellers become classic?”

Not only did we have these conversations among ourselves, but one of

the professors invited a group of us into his home, once a week, where

seated in his snug library amid his choice editions, we would take up

the technical study of literature, enter into interesting debates about

it, and then sit back in our chairs as our generous host rang for the

refreshments: a home touch which we appreciated thoroughly.

Another pleasurable surprise was the small number of text books that I

found must be purchased. During my first term I bought only two books

for seven classes. The professors regarded the college library as a

sort of encyclopædic text book for over a thousand students: forming

the standard work on history, economics, social science, literature

and the various other departments of the curriculum. At last, I found,

professors and students had broken loose from artificial authorities

and took their history and economics not only from many treatises

on the matter, but from current periodicals, the daily newspaper,

catalogues, year books and similar vital, first-hand sources.

This method of study, in use throughout the college, made the library

something more vivid than a stack of collected books, magazines and

pamphlets: it vitalized it and made it the resort of hundreds of

students every day. It linked our classroom work, the professors’

lectures and our own studies to hundreds and hundreds of books,

periodicals and papers, where otherwise we should have been limited

to a half-dozen omnipotent authorities. In place of reading selected

Orations from a book of compilations, I was compelled to find the

original oration in some yellowed book in which it was first printed.

In studying the leading principles of Forensics I had to go to the

records of the courts to read the original evidence and pleas in the

case. A procedure like that appealed to the mind and made one alert in

judgment. It also made the library the centre where the real, serious

work of the student was accomplished, and where one could come in daily

contact with the fellows who were after serious results during their

four years’ residence in the college.

It was in the library that I first made one of my deepest and most

valuable college friendships.

It chanced that one of my studies, the life and works of Goethe, took

me to a particular section of the reference room where the shelves

of Sociology and Economics filled considerable space. As I made my

excursions into the section, I became accustomed to the presence

of a serious-faced Senior who was constantly occupied with books

and periodicals from those two departments. It became natural for

us, as the term advanced, to ask one another the time or to borrow

pencils or paper. Finally these approaches to intimacy developed into

a friendship; into a ripe friendship which included visits to one

another’s rooms, long walks, communings in the club-room and ante-class

conversations: on all these occasions a true exchange of serious and

most profitable confidences taking place.

Thurber, for that was my companion’s name, though the son of a very

wealthy father and accustomed to the finer touches of society life, had

undergone, in his contact with the college, one of those conscience

awakening, ambition refining and ideal lifting experiences which our

president informed us, time and time again, should be the final results

of a true, college education.

Thurber’s father was one of that type of American men who boast

that their success has been attained through self-improvement and

self-education and who crystallize their own peculiar and fortunate

experience into formal axioms, on which every one else must seek

success. Thurber’s father had to his credit at the time a very large

textile mill in a textile city in the South and it had been his supreme

desire that his son, immediately on quitting High School, should go

into the industry, work his way through it, and take charge of it in

the end.

But Thurber had no inclination towards lint and the stifling heat of a

cotton mill, and he had so informed his father. He also told him that

nothing less than four years at a college, where he could meet fellows

worth meeting, would please him.

“You can imagine the look my father gave me when I made that

proposition, for it knocked to splinters his special pet theories

concerning education,” said Thurber. “He stormed about ‘self-made men,’

and quoted Lincoln and some others from the classic list of non-college

men: pointed to himself and the huge industry he had created without

the aid of a college education, and, in all, gave me to distinctly

understand that a college education would spoil a good employer: that

it was a waste of time, and that if I was set on going to college, why

I could go on my own funds--which I did not have--and be hanged! Of

course I was lazy, undecided and youthful: just at the age when all

life is a perpetual sunny day. I wanted to come to college to sport

around and imagined my doom sealed when father emphatically refused to

fund me, but mother--say Priddy, what would the spoiled children of the

rich do without generous-hearted mothers?--my mother privately funded

me and sent me here and still maintains me, even against father’s

orders, for he will not relent and imagines me to be the fool of fools

in taking the course I did.”

“The so-called ‘self-made men’ are usually very set men,” I replied.

“Set?” muttered Thurber, “even a vice, tight locked, is loose by

comparison with the prejudices my father has against a liberal

education. Well, I came this way and started in to sport it and

expected to be tutored through my courses by the narrowest passing

marks. I spent most of my time either in the fraternity house chugging

at a piano or sitting in my room with my feet perched on the table

gazing into space. Then I got the--the glimpse, Priddy, and that

changed it all.”

“The glimpse, what was that?”

“Well, I can’t exactly define it or locate where it first began, but

I do recall that one day, in the classroom--it was in Sociology--the

professor set me thinking on a line I had never considered

before. I can’t tell what it was that he said explicitly, but he

implicitly suggested to my mind that there are such things as

dividends-not-of-money. Of course having been used to the other sort

of dividends all my life, I was attracted to the idea that there were

other dividends. I kept thinking about it and one thing led to another.

The president spoke one day, in chapel, of the educated man’s duty to

his generation. I linked that to ‘dividends-not-of-money’ and worked

it out to my satisfaction that there was for me, the son of a wealthy

manufacturer, a place of usefulness and service in the world.”

“You had a call to the ministry, then, Thurber?” I demanded.

“Gracious, no: not that!” he exclaimed, in a tone that implied I

had proposed something too extravagant for fancy. “I a clergyman! I

respect the cloth, Priddy, and I am glad that you are making it your

profession, but really, that’s not my line. Perhaps I’m not cut out for

it. I know I’m not.”

“You planned to go into settlement or Y.M.C.A. work, probably,” I

hinted, “so many college fellows give themselves to that form of

service in these days, Thurber.”

“I know they do, Priddy, but I didn’t work it out in those directions,

either, but in a more vital way: one that has aroused every bit of

latent enthusiasm for service and helpfulness that might have been

hidden away in so pampered a body as mine. It’s what I call the

glimpse, Priddy. Want me to explain it?”

“Certainly I do.”

“Well, I really was put in a fix by so much talk in the classrooms from

the faculty and in the chapel by the President about ‘moral leadership’

and all that, and really thought at first that they were asking me

to go into definite self-sacrificing avocations like settlement work

and the other forms of social service, and I had no hankering for

that, either. I hated to leave father alone in his old age and wanted,

eventually, to succeed him in the ownership and direction of his

mills. I imagined myself a callow materialist, opposed to spiritual

forms of influence, but I did not want to give up the business. You

can probably imagine how heathenish I felt when I contrasted father’s

industrial policy with the call to be a social servant. I began to

think back to what father’s self-education had done for him and had

done for his employees. I faced the truth for the first time: how his

narrow-minded policy had brought him great wealth at the expense of

his self-respect and the happiness of so many of the people who worked

for him. For years and years and years, he had been just paying wages

for work done: that was all. He had paid no attention to the moral

or social welfare of his people: the hundreds of families under his

control. He did not go to their church, attend their lodges, go into

their homes, or ever make it his policy to inquire about their welfare.

He was just simply using them as tools towards the securing of a

fortune--for me, that was all. I saw it all, how he had been creating

in his little corner of our American industry, labor hostility,

unsanitary conditions, poor types of ignorant, drunken, loafing

citizens until the tenements belonging to his firm formed a perfect

slum. But he had not the eyes to see, nor has he yet; but he goes on

in the darkness and in the groove of his own selfishness, intensifying

the disloyalty of his employees and incidentally hurting his own

reputation. Yet I could not bring myself to give up desiring to take

on that industry. It was right then that the glimpse came.” Thurber

paused for a moment and then continued:

“Like the breaking of day, it flashed into my soul one morning in

Ethics class, that if I could only go to work in that industry and

reform it, that I should be doing a public service: that I should be

following the advice of the college and giving moral service. But I

realized that I should have to train myself in the science of ethics

and morals; the history of economics and the deeper things of social

science in order to reform the business intelligently, constructively

and profitably to myself and the employees.”

“Oh,” I commented, “you want to make your type of social service earn

money?--is not that an unusual sort of social service?”

Thurber smiled and said:

“It does sound worldly, especially to a minister, Priddy, but the

strange thing about it is, as I have figured it out, that if I do

take an educated, intelligent, thoroughly scientific interest in

my employees, and manage to clean up their tenements, their morals

and their minds through welfare work, I shall, in the same stroke,

be increasing their loyalty to the business, be redoubling their

efficiency, be preparing a higher grade of workman: all of which will

increase the earnings of my plant.”

“In other words, Thurber, you are going to work on the principle that

humanity and welfare work are good business policy?”

“Yes,” nodded Thurber. “If you, as a minister, were phrasing it you

would say, ‘Godliness is profitable in all things’--even in good

industrial management--to mix in Shakspeare, it is ‘twice blessed, it

blesseth him that giveth’--the employer--‘and him that receiveth’--the

worker. That’s what I call ‘the glimpse’ and you may imagine how

eagerly I am tugging at the strings in order to be working it out

practically.”

“But it may turn out to be fine theory: mere dreaming, Thurber?”

“Oh no,” he protested. “Read the countless numbers of sociological

works that I have and follow the countless numbers of experiments that

have been made in this direction and you will agree that it is the most

sane procedure.”

“College has meant something very definite to you, then, Thurber?”

“I should say it had. I tell you I believe I understand, now, the

tremendous suggestion that lies behind the college emphasis that

its students stand in their businesses and interests against mere

commercialism and flood them with intelligent, moral service. Besides,

think what significance lies in my studies now: the whole course seems

bent to broaden me towards the intelligent, economical use of human

beings: psychology will give me trained insight, a course or two in

physiology helps me to understand the limits of workingmen’s endurance

and wide reading in literature will aid me to intelligently work out a

policy of self-culture in the workingmen’s libraries I shall form. Oh,

I have come to realize that a business education is a thousand times

more than learning bookkeeping, the names of the tools, and a little

mathematics from which to compute wages. It demands, in my estimation,

the broadest college culture and I mean to secure it.”

“Just the antithesis of your father’s theory,” I suggested.

“Yes, and think, too, how much he has lost by it. You would understand

how enthusiastic I am about it, Priddy, if you could have one glimpse

of the people and tenements around father’s mill. I feel that right

there is my call.”

“I know something about the waste, the riot and the ruin that have

followed in the wake of narrow-minded, selfish, uncultured and

unsympathetic manufacturers, Thurber. If the college only manages to

send out a hundred thousand graduates filled like you with this spirit

of humane statesmanship, what a revolution would take place in labor

conditions!”

“It would be the front door of God’s kingdom, Priddy,” affirmed

Thurber, “sure enough!”

Throughout that year, from the seriousness with which Thurber asked

questions in his classes, from the eagerness with which he was ready

to talk about welfare work, from the diligence with which he fastened

himself to the library alcoves marked: Economics and Sociology, and

from the pervading seriousness of his manner, one might easily have

guessed that in him one looked on a youth aflame with a consuming,

zealous ambition to make his stewardship of men and his college culture

yield the highest per cent of moral earnings. I felt proud to call him

my friend.

Another of my companions during the senior year was “Quiet” Sanderson,

the student who had introduced me to Quarles. “Quiet” was one of those

illogical and fanciful appellations in which the students delighted,

and was paradoxically twisted from Sanderson’s fluent tendencies.

Sanderson occupied a corner room in one of the newer dormitories. In

it was a piano on which he played Beethoven and rag-time with equal

ease. The mission bookcase was topped by a very large, felt college

streamer and a “perpetual care” sign, which in his Freshman wildness he

had taken from a cemetery. As he was a literary man with a pronounced

taste for Poe and the French short story writers, there were various

evidences of “atmosphere” in the orderings of the room. For instance,

some old swords, which might have been discovered in the ruins of Troy,

but which, in fact, were clever imitations bought for a song in Boston,

hung over the door. A Turkish fez, which Sanderson would wear when

company was present, usually hung from the clothes post in a corner of

the room, over a quaint, full-length lounging robe made from scarlet

cloth and embroidered with Mohammed’s crescent. An oriental scent

lingered on those habits of dress; a scent which I have seen Sanderson

compound from barks and minerals bought at the druggist’s and of which

he would never give me the names. When he held a spread or a meeting

of any sort, Sanderson’s room would be thick with the fumes of joss

which he kept burning from a blue Chinese bowl. If any one complained,

Sanderson would have no scruples in telling the complainant that

perhaps the smoke would be even denser and more sulphurous in a later

destination!

It was fortunate that I did not catch, like some insidious fever,

Sanderson’s habit of procrastination, for while his dreams were in the

present tense, real, and vivid, his deeds lingered in the nebulous

future. Thus, one night while he lounged on his couch wearing his

fez, he informed me that he had the plot of an exciting tale that a

publisher might make a fortune by. There was a secret staircase in the

first chapter, and between that and the twenty-eighth--a distance of

eight thousand words, for he had measured them--enough blood was shed

in the numerous duels, alley encounters and small riots with the watch,

to stain a miniature Waterloo.

“What are you wasting your time with those blood and thunder yarns

for?” I exclaimed, for the utmost frankness was the rule between us.

“Blood and thunder!” he echoed. “Why, it’s thoroughly exciting,

whatever you may say about it, Priddy. In my best style, too. Racy,

full of tender sentiment at the love passages, and written with an iron

pen, whose tip was flaming hot!”

“Let me see this epic of thunder then,” I demanded. “I should like to

look it over.”

“Oh,” yawned Sanderson, “I haven’t had time to put it on paper--yet. I

have my studies you know!”

Thus it was not only with his literary dreams, but also with his

studies. He never seemed to be in his books, but I knew that at some

secret hour he must work hard, for his recitations were generally

brilliant.

He was a sly fellow, at times, especially when he chanced to be back

with work. It was his habit then to get me in his room, when he would

yawn and say:

“Priddy, what did the professor conclude about that Lochner fellow?”

Stephen Lochner was one of the Dutch painters we were studying.

I would tell him as well as I could. Then he would drawl:

“Uh, I didn’t follow the professor at all when he said that the early

Dutch school, Van Eyck and the others--let’s see, how many were there?”

I would tell him, exactly, with names and dates, and then he would

drawl:

“Sure you got them all, Priddy?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I’ll bet you’re grafting the course, Priddy, and haven’t been near the

references in the library, eh?”

“Sanderson, I’ve got every note of importance, and have worked up every

single picture!”

Then the yawning fellow would turn over to me, lift up his fez in the

politest manner and say, with his endearing smile:

“Oh, is that so! Then Priddy, I shan’t need to bother much myself,

shall I? You can give me some fine dope on the course!”

Seeing that I was caught, there was no way out of it but to become

the unofficial tutor to his lazy highness; a duty, however, which was

pleasant enough, for we had so many things in common. There was a sense

of embarrassment, however, in the fact that Sanderson would go into the

examinations of the course, after I had prompted him, and by some freak

of the angel of Providence, his guardian spirit, he would out-top me

with marks!

One Monday morning I dropped into his room, on my way across the

campus, when he came from his bedroom arrayed in his bath-robe, for he

had been oversleeping, and he said to me,

“Congratulations, Priddy!”

“What’s this for?” I exclaimed.

“For the honorable winner of two literary prizes!” he exclaimed.

“Two?” I gasped.

“Yes, and firsts, my friend! I want to get in on the ground floor and

get a college ice on the prize money,” he smiled.

“And how do you know this?” I asked.

“The announcements were posted Saturday, after you had left, Priddy.”

“Then you shall have the treat, Sanderson.”

The two prize checks--beautifully decorated with the college seal and

ornamental borders--were used to pay for the winter’s supply of wood,

at home, and to clear off a store bill. I felt that my first adventure

into literature had amply repaid me in fellowships, discipline, and

cash: a well-rounded reward.

When I arrived home, for the long summer vacation, I began to ride over

the hills to outlying farm-houses in a canvass of fellowship among

my parishioners, whom I had never seen in church. My bicycle rides

exhausted me in this work, as the summer was excessively hot. Between

the village services, on Sundays, I trundled my bicycle up a long hill

until I came to a crossroad schoolhouse to which I had invited the

isolated people, for services. The people who came to this service

would not sing, so that part of the time they were treated to vocal

solos by me, to which I had to play my own accompaniment on the little

parlor organ I had secured. As my skill on the organ keys was limited

to hymns up to the limits of two sharps or as many flats, my repertory,

like that of a hand-organ, was easily exhausted. But the people seemed

thankful for this interruption of the monotony of their back-road

life, and though I never took up an offering or asked them to do

anything more than attend the services, which they did with increasing

enthusiasm, I knew from their thanks and their faces that it had been a

profitable venture, an appreciated service.

But the strain of such a responsibility in addition to my college work

was bound to ruin my health, so I resolved that the parish should be

free to engage a permanent, resident pastor, and to that end I resigned

and sought out a place nearer the college, where I could go through the

next year as a pulpit supply and have my wife with me, in my own home,

near the college campus.

My new parish, which I visited only on Sundays, was a most delightful

village, where an unusual number of interesting people made their

homes. Though, at first sight, the village appeared an isolated, sleepy

place, yet a plunge into its activities and a catching of its spirit

meant the discovery of a number of enterprising, intellectual, and

social efforts, of which any large community would have been proud.

There was a village nature club. This club was composed entirely of

the townspeople, yet one of the members had been the co-author with a

scientist in the study of fresh-water algæ, another member had made an

exhaustive study of grasses and minerals in such a scientific manner

that his work had received the commendation of the state botanist. The

club had expert bird students and a butterfly collector. Another of

its members had discovered a rare fern, hitherto never found east of

the Mississippi. The members of this club, surrounded as they were by

the riches of summer and winter beauty, lived in a glorious world of

adventure. When one family drove home, up the long road to its pine

groves and isolated farm-house, it counted the varieties of flowers

growing by the wayside and made a report of great interest to the other

members of the society. Another member watched the stars and gave

reports on the newer astronomical happenings.

Then, too, such intellectual interests reacted upon the social life of

the little community, and a tennis court for the boys, clubs and sports

for the girls, village improvement undertakings, and very interesting

and rare lectures through the long winter, were the rule, backed by

trained, interested people. This type of community, also, made the

church a very desirable and interesting one, and made it easier for me

to be away from Sunday to Sunday, for the social concerns were certain

to go on under efficient and responsible management.

Meanwhile, my wife and I had brought our little boy to the college

town, and had established ourselves in three rooms under the roof of

a very tiny cottage. Though we had our dining-table near the kitchen

stove and were otherwise crowded almost to discomfort, yet the last

year of my educational career meant less anxiety and more inspiration

because I could have my home in the midst of it.

_Chapter XXXVII. Teiresias, the Blind Prophet, and Squeem, the Student

in the Back-waters of College Life. A Night of Grim Fate_

One winter afternoon as I approached Quarles’ room, to take him for a

walk, I heard a loud voice raised in angry altercation, as I thought.

I paused on the dormitory stairs, and there came to my ears the blind

student’s voice, raised high, as if he were spitting fire. I hurried to

his door and entered the room to see what the quarrel between my friend

and his enemy could be.

“Priddy, sit down!” quoth Quarles, pausing in his strange heat of

jargon. “Listen,” and then, standing in the center of the room, he

declaimed this strange-sounding sentence:

“_Eipo ti deta kall, in orgitze pleon!_” and attended it with a fierce

and angry thrust of his fist, as if he were thrusting red-hot bolts

down the unwilling throat of a helpless foe.

“Well, of all the strange jumbles, Quarles!” I exclaimed, “what is the

baby talk, please?”

“_Soo de athlios ge taut oneiditzon, a soi oudeis os ouxi tond

oneidiei taxi!_” he continued, scowling frightfully and staring with

his expressionless eyes as if he would have his stored up wrath break

through to flash like fierce lightning on the pride of his unseen

opponent.

“Taxi?” I mused, “that means automobile riding at ten dollars a

minute--what is the rest?”

“It’s Greek,” he explained, sitting down. “I am the blind Prophet

Teiresias, in the Greek drama ‘King Œdipus,’ to be given by the

college. Let me translate!”

He sprang to the middle of the floor, and, in English, attended by the

same angry gestures, he declaimed to the scoffing King whom he was

warning:

“‘Shall I speak something more, to feed thy wrath?’” and then he paused

to explain, “and when you called it baby talk, I recited the line which

I am to use when the King slanders me for being blind, ‘O miserable

reproach, which all who now behold thee, soon shall thunder forth on

thee!’ and,” went on Quarles, “you are to know, if you do not know it

now, how that later the King does blind himself with hot irons and

fulfils the prophecy I hurl at his coward lips!”

“Horrible, it must be!” I shuddered. “What a dark tragedy to lighten a

college stage!”

“But,” mused Quarles, “think of the achievement, in these days, when

the college critics are charging the college with immersing itself in

practical concerns so as to forego the classics. My work is cut out

for me, Priddy,” he went on. “If they are to have a real blind man for

Teiresias, they must also have fair acting of the lines, for it is all

to be given in Greek, not a word of English; for barbarians like you,

who will probably be mystified, there will be an English line-for-line

translation.”

“Oh,” I retorted, “I have studied some Greek. I have read the New

Testament!”

Quarles laughed,

“That is only the introduction to Greek. Listen!”

He stood before me and recited the fluid, rounded, Greek lines of the

blind Prophet, as he leaves the King,

“‘Ere I depart, I will declare the word

For which I came, not daunted by thy frown.

Thou hast no power to ruin me.’”

“You will have to have a clear brain for the storing of so much pure,

classic speech, Quarles,” I said. “Come out for a walk over the

four-mile road with me and you may talk King Œdipus to me till I faint!”

So, arm in arm, over the ruts of the four-mile road, which first took

us up a steep hill and then around to the west through some dark, cool

woods, the blind student and I walked, and talked of the Greek

tragedy in which he was to play so realistic a part.

[Illustration: SO ARM IN ARM THE BLIND STUDENT AND I WALKED]

On our way back, as we neared the campus, Quarles said:

“Priddy, have you ever met ‘Squeem’ Hirshey? I’ve got to see him before

supper, if you’ll take me to him. He’s one of the old men of the

chorus, in the play, and wants me to help him with pronunciation.”

“No, I haven’t met him,” I said.

“A poor Georgian,” explained Quarles, “lives in a stuffy bit of a room

with an Irish family, down at The Alley; you know where that is, of

course.”

So while we walked in the direction of “Squeem’s” lodging, Quarles

gave me full information about this student, one who lived in the

back-waters of college life.

“In some unaccountable way,” said Quarles, “Squeem managed to get a

decent preparatory education in the South, in a place where most of

the people lived in huts. Missionary education, I think. However, he

came here, passed entrance exams all right, and was awarded a couple

of scholarships that bring him in about a hundred and fifty dollars a

year. He tells me that he manages to get enough work to support him:

that he earns his room rent with the Gibboneys by doing chores, though

what chores such a poor family can have for him to perform, I cannot

understand. He cooks his own meals on an oil stove, and, for that

purpose tries never to go over seventy-five cents a week for his food.

As for clothes, well--he patronizes ‘Eddie’, the old clothes-man, and

manages to get cast-off shoes and clothes at ridiculously low prices.

A suit for four dollars and a decent pair of shoes, not much worn, for

fifty cents!”

“I must have seen him,” I explained, “but of course, I cannot place

the name. A queer one, too; reminds one of Dickens’ Squeers, the ugly

schoolmaster.”

Quarles smiled.

“That name was tacked on a year ago, when he was a Freshman. It seems

that he kept himself to his room and never mixed in things, sort of

a timid, bashful chap, but full of energy when it comes to study.

A down-at-the-heels fellow, I have heard him called. Well, he was

squeamish about everything, and it was natural for the Freshies to

tack him with ‘Squeem’ and by that name he will always be known to the

future generations of college men.”

“Here’s the alley!” I announced, after a few minutes more of talk. We

had passed down an outlying road where, on the very outskirts of the

village, stood a row of cheap tenements. Between these, at an angle,

lay an alley filled with ashes, tin cans and broken bottles. This alley

led up to two ill-looking shanties, so small that by comparison with

the houses farther in the town they seemed no more than half-ruined

doll houses.

“It’s the blackest house,” whispered my companion. “Go around to the

rear. His room is up the back stairs.”

As we rounded the black shanty the sound of gurgling and churning

reached our ears, and then, back of a line of flapping, wet clothes,

we came on a middle-sized, but excessively gaunt youth, wearing an

oil-cloth apron, such as we wore in the chemistry classes when we

performed experiments, with a bib that fitted close to his neck. He

wore under it a ragged, red sweater, and was churning a washing machine

full of clothes, while, at his back, a stout, red-faced Irishwoman was

engaged in taking clothes from a basket and hanging them on lines.

Hanging from a row of nails on the outside of the house were all shades

and colors of students’ laundry bags. Underneath them, wriggling in a

broken and dirty clothes basket, lay a six-months-old baby, sucking a

soiled thumb and apparently finding it nourishing.

“Hello, Quarles!” greeted the washerman, in great embarrassment at our

discovery of him, “I didn’t expect you!” A Southern drawl was evident

in his speech. He was about to take off his apron, when the Irishwoman,

throwing a frown of dissatisfaction in my direction, growled:

“Mister Hirshey, an’ don’t you be lavin’, mind you. Them things’ve got

to be done. You can talk while you work; but work you must, and the

young gentlemen can go hang till you’ve time, if they care!”

Squeem’s waxen cheeks, which seemed before to have no signs of blood

about them, flushed, and he said, apologetically, as he resumed his

churning,

“Only ten minutes more, Quarles. We can talk, and then we can go to the

room.”

I was introduced to the student and recognized in him the one whom I

had passed on the campus, time and time again in the winter, with his

shivering body fitted to ill-measured clothes, and his goose-fleshed

wrists and ungloved hands hanging like dead weights from below his coat

sleeves.

Ten minutes later, after I had watched the Southerner dip out the

dripping mass of laundry and put it through the wringer, we were

conducted into the dark kitchen with its odor of cabbage, and ascended

by a wabbly stairway to the loft, one half of which was given to

Squeems for his abode. A greasy, sour odor of cooking permeated the

room. It was lighted by two narrow panes of glass fitted to a makeshift

frame, and covered by a curtain of imitation tapestry, with the design

of a red Swiss house half buried amid gray bushes and a row of stiff,

brown poplars. A cot bed stood in a corner with a bundle of warm quilts

in confusion on it, for evidently our host had little skill in his

housekeeping. A packing case, on end, with the open side towards us,

had been skilfully transformed into book shelf, storage place and desk.

A short row of text books was ranged on the packing case. Besides

a kitchen chair there was no other seat, save a tin-covered trunk

from which Squeem had to take a few dishes, an oil stove and a bread

tin,--his dining apparatus,--before it could be utilized for a seat.

The following half hour was spent by Quarles and the Southerner in the

pronunciation, the translation, and oratorical interpretation, not only

of the chorus part of the play, which would be sung, but of the Blind

Prophet’s thrilling lines, which Quarles recited before Squeem with

even more spirit than he had to me, for, he explained, as we left the

house:

“That poor fellow may be in the back-waters of college, but he’s got a

really excellent mind. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him come near to

leading his class in scholarship. I like him--that Squeem,” and then

my blind companion quoted, with great impressiveness, “‘Grand, gloomy,

and peculiar, he sat upon his throne, a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the

solitude of his ... originality.’”

Then the night of the Greek play arrived in which Quarles and his

strange friend were to appear.

My wife and I sat in the gallery, in Assembly Hall, amongst the vast

throng of spectators.

A dark, green curtain covered the stage. The white interior of the

hall, with soaring ceiling panels, dotted with flaming rows of

electric lights, the paintings on the gallery walls of presidents and

benefactors of the college, the ushers in evening dress, fine, manly

samples of youth, the well-dressed women in their opera costumes: all

this was a glorious show to look upon, in itself. But when a group of

gowned students took their places, in chairs, near the stage, and were

followed by the orchestra, and the musical director,--then the programs

fluttered, expectantly, even in the hands of the professors and invited

guests from other colleges, who had come to enjoy the literary treat of

the much-heralded play.

The leader, with a gentle tap on his rack, brought the musicians into

position. A stroke of the wand in the air, and the instruments began

with the introductory theme, a droning chant, with wild whisperings

in the background, as the violins tried to paint for our senses the

chatter of the fierce Fates that were to hound King Œdipus to his

horrid death, in payment to their stern laws for his unconscious sin.

Then, as the haunting prelude paused on a wailing minor, as if to tell

us that forever and forever man’s despair should continue--under the

rule of the Fates, the lights in the hall were darkened, amidst a

silence. There was a pause, and then, as the heavy curtains were drawn

aside while the drums crashed forth a suggestion of impending strife,

we looked upon a marvelous palace front in ancient Boeotian Thebes.

Austere gloom, the fluted, pillared doorway with the brazen door

bespoke, though the sky was tinted as if for a sunrise, or sunset. Then

before our eyes, in that ancient world was unfolded the grim lesson

that even unconscious sin must pay at last the uttermost farthing.

Quarles, transformed into a bearded, led prophet, spake his lines with

heart-ringing pathos. But as for “Squeem” among the bearded men, who

chanted their parrotish gossip, I could not distinguish him.

Heaps on heaps of color were massed on the stage, with a studied effort

to inflame the imaginations of the audience. When it seemed that the

finest effects of grouping and harmonies of color had been obtained,

other actors would suddenly appear and make the splendor of the setting

pass belief.

Word by word, gesture by gesture, chant by chant, we followed the

dismal but dramatic tale from its air of glory and freedom into the

darker shadows of dread which Teiresias foretold. Moods of king and

queen, of the old men who stood by the temple, of the priest and the

shepherd changed slowly and steadily from scoffing to belief, from

belief to alarm, from alarm to fear, from fear to resistance, from

resistance to submission, from submission to final reparation. Woven

into the shudderings of the old men, witnesses of death and grewsome

penalties, were the musical whisperings, to keep our minds upon the

unseen spirits of the vengeful gods who were directing the grim tragedy

until all the sobs that men and women could give were ended, until the

last dreg of a tear remained, and until only the merest whisper of a

cry could sound in the chambers of a suffering heart!

We went into the night, from it, feeling that our hearts had been

smitten heavy blows, that our life had fastened itself to leaden

anchors. The terrible reality, the magnificence of Fate, the classic

splendor of sufferings in epic girth had been staged before us.

Teiresias’ words hung in the air, everywhere, even under the dark sky

outside:

“O miserable reproach! which shall soon

Thunder forth on thee!”

_Chapter XXXVIII. How Ellis, the Captain, Taught me the Spirit of

Contest. I Turn Pamphleteer on Behalf of Scholarship. But Find from

Garvin that Scholarship and Education may be Separate Matters. Account

of a Truly Classic Event, which Makes the Students Study Color Schemes

and Gives us a Chance to Appear in Gowns_

One afternoon I was sitting on the senior fence, watching two

fraternity teams wage a contest in baseball, when I saw Ellis, the

football captain approaching, with his finger upraised to draw my

attention.

Ellis was an impressive fellow with his towering shoulders, oak-like

limbs, and ruddy cheeks. In his flannels, tan oxfords, and varsity

cap he spelled in large capitals, “Exercise.” For Ellis was known

preëminently, in the athletic world, as one of the year’s gods who sit

on the pinnacle of Olympus, the revered of freshmen, the applauded of

sophomores, and the envied of fellow seniors. By the newspapers he was

heralded as the best player of football in his position in all America.

His name, through the years of his playing, when he appeared with nose

guard and canvas suit, had been on the lips of admiring multitudes.

His photographs, showing him catching a football, or in pose for a

scramble, had been spread on many city papers that year.

In the college, more than in the outside world, Ellis’ fame had won the

highest respect. He was the marked man: marked for friendships, for

class honors, and for the respect of the faculty. A freshman, given the

merest smile or word by Ellis, immediately ran to his room and wrote a

burning letter about it to his mother or his sister. The fraternities

and senior societies had vied with one another to secure him for a

comrade. He was the college “boss” in a good sense, for if a group of

excited students broke the public peace, by an unruly demonstration

before the town jail, where one of the students had been immolated for

throwing a snowball at the village justice, it was Ellis who jumped

on a flour barrel, which he had ordered brought from the back door of

a nearby grocery, and at a word, commanded the incipient riot to break

up; which it did without a murmur.

“Take a walk, Priddy?” asked Ellis, as he drew near.

“Certainly,” I said, jumping from my perch and measuring my stride to

his.

“Priddy,” he said, “you know about the Bristow Oratorical Prize for

seniors?”

“Yes.”

“The trials come off soon. Why don’t you go into it?”

“I hadn’t thought of it,” I admitted. “Besides, I don’t think it would

be wise. I am no orator; I mean that I do not use finished gestures,

and my throat trouble has taken the spirit from my voice. In addition

to that, Ellis, when one is used to the pulpit, it is really a

different proposition to speak in an exhibition.”

“But you will have a chance with the literary side. That counts one

half,” persisted Ellis.

“Now look here,” I smiled, turning on him, suddenly, “why don’t you go

into it?”

“I will, Priddy. I certainly will!”

“You’ve made your record in football, and you ought to go into this

oratorical contest, Ellis.”

“I’m going into it,” he replied, “not so much for the mere idea of

trying for the prize, but for a purpose.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Priddy,” he continued, seriously, “I’ve been up against it

ever since I indulged in sports. It has eaten up much of my time, and

there have been days and days when the grind of training and practise

and of having to go to bed early, and all that, have been wearing and

uninspiring. If it hadn’t been that I felt that I was maintaining the

honor of the college by my playing, I should have quit the game long

ago. Well, there are a lot of folks that think of college athletics as

a waste of the student’s time and as a feature of college life not good

in itself, but which must be endured, if men are to be won to college.

Of course you know that’s not the truth; at least in this place.”

“Of course it’s not so,” I insisted, just as earnestly. “College sports

are the cleanest, most honorable of sports. They teach the students

in this college to be manly in losing, to hold their tongues when the

visiting team makes a fumble, and to cheer one for the other. It’s so

different from the national game, outside of the college, where the

crowds in the bleachers throw pop bottles at the umpire, insult the

players, and nag one another bitterly. Our college sports teach the

students moral control and self-restraint.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Priddy,” agreed Ellis, warmly. “If the

game had been otherwise, I would not have wasted my time with it.

Well, there are a lot of folks, even in college,” he continued, “who

really think that because a man makes good on a football team that he’s

not capable with his studies, or with the literary features of the

college.”

“There again,” I agreed, “they don’t know all the facts. Think of the

fellows on your team, this year. Several of your best players are

making excellent records in class work.” I enumerated three of the

brightest players who had maintained a rank of over eighty-five, in

spite of the great amount of time given to sports.

“Yes, Priddy,” replied Ellis, “that’s so, but the public at large

don’t think of it in that way. Well, that is why I want to go into the

oratorical contest; just to show folks that a fellow interested in

athletics is also able to manifest an interest in literary matters!”

“Good!” I exclaimed, won by his sincere earnestness. “But why do you

want me to go in, too, as a competitor? I should think you wouldn’t

care to increase the competition, merely as a matter of self-interest.”

“Oh,” he laughed, “the more, the merrier. I thought you ought to go in,

too, for I think you would stand a good chance, Priddy.”

Finally I agreed to go in with him. On the walk we advised about

subjects and the next day Ellis came to my room for some material I had

promised him on his proposed theme.

Then began the strangest preparation for a contest in which I had ever

indulged. We conferred with one another about the points we were to

make, and prodded one another on, when either became slothful. Finally,

when our speeches were memorized, we took afternoon walks into a field

where we shaped our orations into some definite spoken form before

each other. Ellis would hear me through, suggest how this gesture and

that thought might be improved. Then I would criticize him in the same

way. We hid nothing from one another, though we were to be rivals on

the platform. He knew every turn of my speech and I knew every turn of

his. He added force to mine by thinking out for me a new analogy that

I could insert at a weak part. I altered a misquotation in his which

would have lost him a point. It was an inspiring experience for me. I

was witnessing, in Ellis, a sportsmanship of which there could be no

more refined example. I did not wonder, then, at the praise the college

had given him.

But this was not all, for on the afternoon when the trials took

place,--in the big, dim room of empty seats, with a few judges

scattered lonesomely about,--as I took my turn and was walking to the

platform, I felt a hearty clap on the shoulder and heard Ellis whisper,

“Good luck to you, Priddy!” exactly the way in which he had encouraged

his men in the big football contests. I walked to the platform

thrilled through by the magnificence of Ellis’ sporting spirit. I felt

that if any other man won, it should be Ellis.

I did not do well with my oration. I was marked down. Ellis’ turn

came. I watched him, admiringly, as he strode to the platform in his

masterful way. His gestures, over which we had worked with patience,

were still undisciplined, and at times his voice thundered too much.

But he came down with the consciousness of having done his best. He was

declared eligible for the final contest.

Later, when the final contest took place, Ellis, who had gone into

it with the loftiest ideal of all the contestants, had the thrill of

knowing that he was the winner of the prize. He had won both sides of

the medal, the athletic and literary.

“At least,” he said to me, in bashful comment on his victory, “I think

that some folks will be persuaded that a football man may have some

interest in scholarship.”

Garvin, a fellow Senior, illustrates another phase of college life

and thought. He was a clever individual and one of the editors of the

college newspaper. His “den,” as he loved to term his narrow room in

Wise Hall, had been made to resemble as much as possible an editorial

sanctum. Galley proofs, daubed black with corrections, revisions and

proof marks, had been hung over his desk, as if to forever remind him

that the true function of an editor is revision, as it is the true

function of life. Original artists’ drawings, in charcoal, pen and

ink and pencil, were mixed in with Gibson Girl sketches on the walls.

Three samples of “the worst contributions ever sent into the paper”

were framed in _passe partout_ and hung over the brick of the fireplace

where the curious might read them; one was a Freshman poem whose theme

had never been understood and for the interpretation of which Garvin

had a standing offer of a box of cigars. The “poem” said something

about “the ancient cow, sitting munchingly on the steep broadside

of green, fertile country,” and then went on to irrelevantly bring

in various other cattle, scenes, and people in such an unexplained

matter-of-fact way that the mind was in a whirl at the end. The other

two contributions were attempts at stories, and judged from the first

pages of manuscript exhibited, ended in being nothing more than

attempts.

I had visited Garvin to speak on a matter to which I was giving

considerable thought at the time: the curious disparagement of

scholarship by so many of the students. I had even gone to the pains

of having published in Garvin’s paper my undergraduate protest against

the universal tendency to despise the “plugger” and to esteem the

“grafter”; two terms which marked the antipodes of scholarship. My

article, entitled, “On the Spirit of Work in College,” had been printed

and followed by a parody, written by an unknown student and entitled:

“Priddy Has A Grouch,” in which the writer had openly given all the

honors of the college to the student who refrained from seeking a

salutatory, vying with his classmates for the valedictory or hastening

after academic honors of whatever sort.

“Blatant heresy!” I announced, pointing out the anonymous article.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Garvin. “I rather like it!”

I regarded him in astonishment for a moment and then protested,

“But think of it, man! Denouncing scholarship! A student in a college

denouncing the very charter of the college. It’s incredible: audacious

and heretical: undermining the very foundations of the college! And to

think that you, an editor, interested in culture and education, support

such a paradox. You ought to be tortured in a Smithfield fire or have

your thumbs twisted with Inquisition screws!”

“Oh, I don’t know!” smiled Garvin. “I’m not the only one that scoffs

somewhat at the scholars: there are hundreds of us on the campus:

hundreds of us.”

“Yes,” I replied, “sour grapes, probably.”

“Now look here, Priddy. I’m no loafer. You know me. I believe in

education or I would not be spending my four years here. If I were

to put all my time in study: the time which I invest in my editor’s

duty, for instance, and in the mandolin club, I think there is in me a

potential honor man at least, even as there is in Sanderson a potential

valedictorian, and in Ellis a potential Phi Beta Kappa (if he left

off athletics), and in Forrest a potential magna, triple X, summa,

double-barrelled cum lauda if he didn’t put so much effort into the

evening classes for the Italian laborers down at the Reservoir. But the

truth is--these men, like myself, aren’t very enthusiastic about high

marks, or the honors that high marks and class rankings bring to the

undergraduate.”

“No wonder the professors get discouraged, Garvin. It’s enough to make

the college founder place dynamite under the campus and blow us to

kingdom come!”

Garvin’s eyes twinkled at his next question.

“Hear about Scholarship Night, Priddy? I know you weren’t there for you

went home that day.”

“Hear about it?” I gasped. “I should say I had. They say that there

was about as much enthusiasm over the reading of the honor roll that

night, in assembly hall, before the students and invited guests, as

there is enthusiasm over--well, say a book entitled, ‘The Thesaurus of

Diction--or Recent Explorations into the Vocabulary of Monkeys.’”

“Enthusiasm!” repeated Garvin, “it was ten miles away that night.

Just a handful of students, lonesomely huddled in the first few rows

of seats and behind them a lighted vacancy. I tell you, Priddy, the

students aren’t interested very much in pure scholarship: even many of

the men who are here for a serious purpose.”

“Then why do they come here, Garvin, tell me that?” I demanded.

“For an education, Priddy.”

“But how can they secure an education unless they are solicitous about

scholarship, Garvin?”

“Oh, I see what is the matter, Priddy. You imagine that because so

many of us aren’t interested in scholarship, pure scholarship, we

aren’t interested in education. Education and scholarship are two very

different things.”

“How do you argue that?”

“You have the old-fashioned idea of a college,” continued Garvin.

“What do you mean?”

“The old New England college: the representative college of olden

days, injected a love of books and the wisdom of books in their

students: reams of the classic poets and prose writers: encyclopædic

furnishings of the mind with the contents of a few good, stimulating

books. Those were the hey-days of pure scholarship. They have existed

here: but we students, today, are illustrations of an evolution in

educational ideals, even if most of us don’t seem to realize it. We

represent the changed temper of higher education. If I may phrase,

offhand, my idea of the change,--it is that the older generation

considered pure scholarship, in itself, the central aim of a college

course, and to an ideal of that sort, Scholarship Nights, Phi Beta

Kappas, and all such educational fashions were not only in keeping

but were producers of tremendous enthusiasms. On the other hand, what

seems to me to lie in the heart of the students now is the demand

for scholarship,--plus _accomplishment_. It is due, no doubt, to the

practical turn of the world during the last few years. I am interested

mightily in scholarship when it helps towards actual accomplishment:

when like a gold coin it purchases something; unlike the old notion

that scholarship was a gold or silver medal, good only to decorate or

dignify the person, or to be kept on exhibition.”

“Are you sincere in that, Garvin?” I demanded. “If so, you should write

it out in editorials, for the criticism of the professors: if you could

substantiate it by concrete facts.”

“Concrete facts, Priddy! Why, it would carry us into the small hours

of the morning if I were to begin their enumeration. Take Ellis,

for instance. You tell me that he went into the medal contest to

vindicate the athletes. There is one example of the coin of scholarship

purchasing something: one concrete expression of the student interest

in scholarship when it leads to something practical and concrete. Can

you imagine Ellis going into a literary contest that would wind up in

itself, without relation to something practical to be gained by it?”

“No.”

“You go around the campus with a test like that, Priddy, and you will

find that scholarship is highly respected wherever it has resulted in

accomplishment. Don’t we respect Professor Florette? I should say we

did. One of the most perfect scholars in the college and yet even the

grafters among the students would throw their caps in the air at any

time for the Professor, and why is it? It is because his scholarship

has actually made him accomplish something. He is president of the

National Science Division of College Instruction and is known and

quoted abroad as an authority in his line. That’s why the students

like him. On the other hand you might pick out a professor here and a

professor there who is very erudite--notice my vocabulary, Priddy--and

who is a perfect scholar in his department, and yet who never

translates his knowledge into life: never writes a useful book, or

influences thought abroad, or is asked to address even a Kindergarten

Teachers’ Convention. All we know of him is that ‘he is a scholar.’

You don’t catch us shouting much for that man, do you? He has not

accomplished anything tangible, ergo--his scholarship is merely an

esthetic satisfaction. That’s why we fellows prefer old Florette.”

“But that’s a very youthful and shallow way of judging, Garvin,” I

replied.

“Well, whether you call it youthful, shallow, or what not, that is the

way most of the students seem to regard scholarship. They are only

interested in it when it means contact with life and the enlargement

of the scholar’s ability for civic usefulness. That is the outcome of

practical America, I suppose. But for the ‘grind’ who slaves for big

marks and the sheer worship of books--and nothing else, why, I don’t

have much use for him. On the other hand, if a fellow grinds out big

marks to play on the football team in security: why, that’s the fellow

that gets the cheer. It’s scholarship plus, with my crowd, and I think

you’d better come in the band-wagon with us, Priddy, for whether the

professors like it or not, and choose to cling to the seventeenth

century exaltation of scholarship _per se_--note my Latin, Priddy--why,

it won’t change matters any.”

“That’s something to think about, Garvin, at any rate.”

“If you observe the students closely, Priddy, I think you’ll find that

they do respect scholarship; put it in the very highest possible place

of influence--when it has led to something.”

“I am glad I had this talk with you, Garvin. I think I understand the

fellows a little better,--I can even forgive the unknown who wrote:

Priddy Has A Grouch!”

“Thank you, Al,” replied the editor. “I am the chap!”

If the failure of Scholarship Night--and a dismal one it was--had

seemed to indicate little respect for pure academic accomplishment at

the College, there soon took place an event which swallowed up that

failure in its overwhelming scholarly success and aroused, in the

student heart, every last atom of admiration for the academical ideal.

Our new President was inaugurated.

Inauguration Day was pre-eminently the real Scholarship Day with

the links closely forged between what Garvin called scholarship

and accomplishment. The President we were to honor represented the

close tie between scholarship and accomplishment. His learning had

brought him a world reputation as a scientist, and it was extremely

interesting, after the talk with Garvin, to note with what unction

the students lingered on the reputation of the President, and how

deferentially they spoke the names of this Royal Society and that

Foreign Body which had honored him for his work.

Garvin’s paper, weeks before the event, teemed with anticipatory gossip

concerning the stellar names in education that were to be printed on

the list of college guests. The campus was to be the show ground for

the American academic peerage; come to honor our chief! At last even

such a loafer in the college as Bridden, who was in danger of losing

his degree by reason of his overindulgence in pool: even he expressed

a pride and interest in the coming of the scholars: the scholars _par

excellence_.

Even down to so technical a consideration as the language of hoods, the

undergraduates manifested fully as much interest as they had been wont

to give to baseball batters’ averages. Garvin’s paper came out with a

color list by which the college presidents, university chancellors,

international statesmen, state officials, seminary heads and the host

of lesser academics could be fully interpreted through the colors on

the gowns they would wear in the procession: white signifying arts and

letters, scarlet theology, purple for philosophy, blue for science,

brown for music and so on through the list, which Garvin editorially

advised each student to either cut out and have in his hand when the

procession moved, or, better still, to carefully memorize it.

The dignity of the impending, classic, stately event; the sorting of

gowns, the whispers and queries concerning what world-famous shoulders

were to receive the highest degrees: all this sobered the students and

stimulated imaginations, days before the actual event transpired.

To me it promised to be the opportunity to see, face to face, the

men of culture and administrative power whose names were familiar in

the far corners of the country: men who not only figured as authors,

administrators, lecturers, scientists, travelers, and moral leaders,

but, among them, potential Presidents of the nation, honored citizens

of public reputation, men whose names were already merged with civic

movements, patriotic events, and national political advances. It meant

that history, successful ambition, leadership, and moral fibre were to

be personified for me in their highest types.

The morning of the inauguration brought with it a great excitement.

The Seniors were to wear gowns that morning for the first time. On

leaving the house, after breakfast, and taking my position near the

Senior Fence, to wait for the formation of the line, a sunburst of

silken scarlet gown dazzled my eyes, as a sedate man of sixty, with a

white beard, hurried along the path, his head topped by a black velvet

bonnet. He was followed by others, in the silken glares of Oxford and

Cambridge, and a continual procession of black-draped figures whose

multi-colored hoods were like lurid gashes cut in the mourning by a

deftly wielded blade.

By nine o’clock the campus was astir with visitors, faculty, alumni,

undergraduates, the band and the sight-seers. Ellis marshalled us into

a double line, so that to the beholder, in our black gowns and black

caps, we resembled a very mournful, if dignified, procession of upright

ravens.

Then the band blared forth a martial thunderclap which pulled our

feet into time. Slowly, led by the musicians, we filed on our way

around the outer edge of the campus, dragging after us the faculty

and distinguished visitors whose chief distinction in the procession

lay in their inability or unwillingness to keep to the step we fixed.

Our two hundred and odd pairs of hands swished against the sides of

our flapping gowns in rhythmic evenness. Not even the precision of a

Black Watch drill could have been finer rendered than was our Senior

march. The heads and bodies swept from side to side like the orderly

attack of a straight, long wave beating backwards and forwards against

a cliff. Then, at Assembly Hall, our double line divided and we stood

with heads uncovered: a lane of honor, while the recipients of honors,

the visiting presidents, the faculty and the alumni threaded their way

between our lines into the hall.

Deeper and deeper into formalism we plunged: all the traditions

of scholarship were called up: all the esthetic possibilities of

academic show and etiquette passed in review before us, cap tipping,

hood placing, and the summing up of the achievements of a lifetime

in two sentences as an honorary degree was bestowed. The trappings

and medievalism of scholarship added a new dignity to the college

atmosphere. The very air we breathed was musty with the scholar’s

tradition.

The only modernness in the event came in the moments of hand-clapping,

as addresses, investiture and degrees followed one another. The

undergraduate chorus, massed in the rear of the enormous carpeted

platform, added to the impressive solemnity of the exercises by its

sonorous harmonies. Then came the event of the occasion, and Ellis,

knight of valor and skill on the football field, was the central

figure in the event. He had been assigned the address representing the

undergraduates. He stalked his way to the platform and stood before us,

backed by the massed greatness of America’s university world. But he

paid no heed to that, as he had not been wont to pay much heed to the

thousands of on-lookers who admired his skill in the games. He took

fire, and was the first to disturb the quiet soberness of the program

by putting vivid gesture and loud, vibrant voice into play. The effect

on the visitors and the undergraduates was electrical. Each one bent

forward as, in no stately rhetoric or formal phrase, Ellis opened his

heart which, at the moment, comprehended the loyalty of all the student

body. As he concluded, the students stood in a mass, and after the

prolonged applause--the finest applause of the event--our cheer-leader

dragged a husky, but thrilling college cheer from our throats, while

Ellis modestly found his place in our midst. As we filed out into the

light of the noon sun, and could easily discover the towering, broad

shoulders of Ellis, our leader, at the head of the line, I thought of

the honor he had brought to the college in his four years’ presence in

it, and saw in him the union of all that is best in American college

life and those qualities which the college aims to invest in every

willing student’s life: loyalty to one’s fellows, physical fitness,

moral alertness, humility in success, and a respect for the law that

governs men and nations.

_Chapter XXXIX. The Lost Parrot. Academic Burlesque. The Nervousness of

the Final Minute. A Religious Outcropping in a Non-Pious Heart_

Since the establishment of my family in the college precincts, I had

seen very little, in a social way, of my old friend Sanderson. I

determined to pay him a visit one evening, and took with me a glass of

grape jelly and some hermit cookies, as a remembrance from my wife.

I found him before a heap of blue papers on which were lead pencil

scribbles. A look of anxiety was on his face. When he saw me, however,

he smiled his pleasure, went over to the hat rack and put on his fez.

“How are you getting along, Sanderson?” I asked.

“Say,” he pleaded, “you couldn’t just run over these reports of mine on

your typewriter, could you, Priddy. I’m back about a dozen, and must

have them in to get passing marks. It would be such a help!”

“Unfortunately, what with sermons, two prize essays on which I am

working, and my own studies, Sanderson, I haven’t a spare minute!”

“Then I’ll have to root out some freshman and give him the job, though

a freshman’s so uninformed! Why, I asked one of ’em to just scribble

a two-page description of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and it

took the idiot most a week to do it, and I don’t think it can be hard

reading, from what the Prof. said about it. Now if I’d had time, I

could have read it in a night!”

“Same old Sanderson,” I muttered. “I don’t know how you’d get through

without help!”

“Well,” he retorted, “since you brought your wife and boy to town,

you’ve done mighty little for me, eh?”

“Oh, you’ll take care of yourself,” I replied.

“Well,” he winked, “I have been lucky, lately. Jimmy’s stuck by me!”

“Who’s your latest benefactor, ‘Jimmy?’” I enquired.

“He’s a medic. who rooms across the campus. The nicest man you ever

met: patient--oh, so patient, and motherly--oh, so motherly!”

“Motherly?”

“Yes, can sew patches on, and buttons, like a real endowed maiden aunt,

and when I’m out of sorts he reads to me, and when I prick my thumb he

brings over a medicine case and drops peroxide on. I sprained my wrist

at hand-ball, and Jimmy soaked and painted it with stuff, and made a

firm leather brace for it. Oh, you wait till he blows in on the medical

profession, he’ll fit in it as no man, before him, ever fitted in it.

He looks after me like a regular private physician, if I’ll only let

him come in and study with me. You see, his own room’s always so full

that he wants to get away.”

Sanderson smiled significantly at me.

“Filled with a lot more soft-soapers like you, eh?” I laughed.

“Well, willing good-nature like Jimmy’s is liable to be imposed on,”

he agreed. “He comes to my room for protection. I tell you, my lessons

have picked up wonderfully since he came.”

“Will he be in tonight?” I asked.

“He sure will!” said Sanderson. “If he doesn’t I don’t know how I’ll

get along with my biology quiz in the morning. I was saving it for him!”

“You fraud! He has his own work to do!”

“Don’t scold, please,” replied Sanderson. “He gets through his work

all right. He’d starve if he couldn’t be a benefactor to somebody. He

will come in tonight. We’ll have a few minutes’ chat. Then he’ll ask me

about the quiz and he’ll let go at me for an hour or so. Then we’ll

have another chat and it will be my bedtime, for I never plan to be out

of bed after half-past ten except on exceptional occasions. I’ll leave

my bedroom door open while I get ready. Jimmy’ll talk to me until I

let out a snore,--I’ll tell him to be sure and snap the lock after he

leaves. Perhaps an hour later he’ll creep out, and go to his own room.

Oh, I swear by Jimmy!”

“And get your marks by him, too, eh?”

“What’s a fellow to do?” asked Sanderson.

As I turned to go, Sanderson yawned,

“Say, Priddy, could you run in with that print on Holbein’s ‘Saint

Barbara?’ I failed to get it, and we have to recite on it, in the

morning. You might bring me the dope on it, too!”

I entered at last upon the final stretch towards my degree. In the

stress of work and the excitement of writing a philosophical and a

literary essay, in competition for two senior prizes, the days of

winter changed into the brighter aspects of spring almost before I was

aware of it. Once more we assembled on the campus for the class “sing,”

and this time my wife could enjoy the music with me, as we stood on the

corner and let our year-old boy ask, “What?” when the cheers began.

The class elections were held, the photograph of the class was taken,

backgrounded against a most rustic wall of stone and arrangement of

wild shrubbery. Our caps and gowns soon followed the class pictures,

and then we wore them to chapel, in which we marched so slowly

and solemnly under the guide of our marshal, that more than one

irrepressible spirit in the ranks would burst out with laughter at so

much dignity in so youthful a crowd. Through these days I often grew

impatient. I was eager, now, with restored health, and with a richer

mine of truth, to be in a parish again, doing my chosen work.

But when commencement week arrived with its sentimental spirit,--then I

felt the full significance of this last educational experience.

A band, brought from the city, gave concerts on the college club porch,

amid a forest of plants and shrubs, and under fairylike illuminations.

Class reunions brought crowds of graduates, who donned yellow hats,

wore clownish clothes, and paraded up and down seeing how much

burlesque they could express. One class engaged an Italian hand-organ

artist who had also, perched on his music-box, an intelligent parrot

which would pick out fortune slips from a box--for five cents. In some

way the class lost the parrot, and I came across the Italian boy,

crying bitterly, as he searched a wild gully for the bird, saying, when

I asked him what the trouble could be,

“Ah, my parrote, he los’, my God, what I do for live now!”

Meanwhile the renters of the organ sat in an automobile and raced back

and forth down the main street while it scattered its wheezy music

along the trail of gasolene fumes.

On one corner, a group of distinguished-looking men and women stood in

the dry gutter, with slips of paper in their hands, singing with more

or less effect, and great seriousness,

“Oh, the class of ’Eighty odd,

It is a glorious band,

It scatters wisdom, grace and power,

Throughout this mighty land!”

Over on the opposite side of the campus a crowd of lawyers, bankers,

ministers, and business men, who would shock their neighbors at home if

they had a shoe-lace untied, paraded in purple wrappers and sun-bonnets

topped with paper roses.

Then the morning of graduation arrived. The mock wrappings were put

aside by the visitors, who appeared in frock coats and sedate manners.

By nine o’clock I joined my classmates at the fence and found my place

in the line. Meanwhile crowds of people in holiday dress thronged the

campus once again, members of the faculty with gowns fluttering in the

wind, and with scarlet, purple, yellow, and white hoods, gathered at

the administration building.

As at the Inauguration the band once more took its place at our head,

struck up its vibrant tune, and then at the dropping of the marshal’s

baton we took the step and marched around the campus, a black,

rhythmical procession of academics. The gay-hooded, but sedate faculty

followed, to march through the double line of honor we formed at the

entrance to the hall. Then we entered and stood at our seats until the

marshal’s baton gave us the signal to be seated.

The deep platform before us was ranged with the faculty, the trustees,

the recipients of honorary degrees, and the musicians, including a

robed choir of students and the musical director.

But my eyes fell on the table at the head of the centre aisle on which

lay a thick, flat heap of sheepskins; mine among them.

Nervously I picked up the program, and, as I looked it through, to see

the catalogue of my academic career, it told to all who searched it

through that Albert Priddy graduated cum laude, and that he had won

four first prizes: two in his junior year and two in his senior year:

two essays, a story, and a research in philosophy.

The addresses, the salutatory, valedictory, and the greeting by the

faculty were given. The choir sang an impressive anthem. The honorary

degrees were conferred with great solemnity. The classmate next to me

said:

“Priddy, my heart is beating so fast that if we don’t get our degrees

soon, it will burst. Just think if anything should prevent our getting

them--now!”

“Don’t mention it,” I suggested, in nervous agitation, “please.”

Finally, however, the dean came down from the platform and we stood.

Then we began a very slow walk around the side aisles, down past the

platform to pass before the dean and receive our degrees. Slowly, ever

too slowly, I drew near, and then, a whispered “Priddy” from the Dean

and the sheepskin was in my hand.

Immediately I changed the position of the tassel of my cap for I had,

that moment, officially shifted myself from the undergraduate rôle of

the college and entered the long, historic ranks of the alumni.

When I got back to my seat, my neighbor, who had expressed the fear

that something would occur, whispered with relief:

“I’m not a religious fellow, Priddy, but I do feel like singing the

doxology, now that I’ve got this!” He pointed to his diploma.

_Chapter XL. In which the Account Comes to a Conclusion in the Life of

a Relative. Martin Quotes Spanish and Has the Last Word._

After we had been established in a parish for some time, I suggested

to my wife that probably the best Christmas present I could give my

Uncle Stanwood and Aunt Millie would be to make them a personal visit

after all my years of absence and recite to them all the facts of

my education, my marriage, and describe to them the two interesting

members of my family.

So I arrived at Uncle Stanwood’s house the week before Christmas with

the intention of spending a week with him. I had been asked to preach

the Christmas sermon by Mr. Woodward, the minister, who had started me

off to the seminary.

My uncle was still living in a mill tenement. “So you’ve got an

education after all!” he commented, putting a loving hand on my

shoulder. “Education has made a difference in you altogether. You are

much different. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

As for my Aunt Millie, she said, “What did you marry an American for?

Can she cook?”

Just then the door opened and in slouched the tallest man I ever saw;

slouched past us without a word and threw himself moodily into a chair

at the end of the supper table. His face had been carved--roughly

carved--out of mahogany; it was gaunt, sun-beaten and lined with fret

marks. He laid big, scarred hands on his plate. His shoulders drooped

and yet were massive in strength. His eyes were like distant lights

well back under the shadow of his bulging brows. A look of disgust

seemed to have lingered on his thin, curled lips since his birth.

He was my cousin Martin who had arrived from England two years before.

When he rose up to reach out one of his great hands to me, there was a

curious, unaccountable antagonism in his tone when he said, “Oh, this’s

him, eh? He’s the lucky dog, is he?”

During the recital of my educational experiences which followed, I

noticed that my most interested listener was Martin. When I came to

those parts which had to do with self-support, he was alert in every

muscle. His eyes blazed at me, devouring every word that I said.

When aunt and uncle left us alone, Martin said: “Priddy, do you think

the world’s treated me--oh, right, just right?”

“What do you mean, Martin?” I asked. “You’ve got fight in your tone.

What’s wrong?”

“Did you never ask that, too?” he retorted, hotly. “Did you ever kick

against the goad? I think you did, once. Don’t forget it, Priddy, ever!

You’re not the only chap that ever wanted to get ahead, don’t lose

sight of that. If it comes to matching ambition, I’ve got enough and

to spare. Here you are, not much over twenty, I take it, yet you’ve

got polished by seven years of schooling. Seven years of it! Have you

any more right to it than me? Here I am nearly thirty and what am I?

Blest if I’m anything but a hod carrier! What have I ever been, Priddy?

Did I ever have a chance? I went into the mill at eight and have been

there till this winter set in. God knows it’s little I know in the way

of schooling! I can write my name and read some; but I got it myself.

You know what the mill can be to an ambitious chap. You never felt

it pressing down and stifling you more than I did. I tell you that.”

He actually spit on his hands and rubbed them, as if on the verge of

striking me.

“The beginning of this winter I said I wouldn’t stand it no longer,

and I won’t! No mill will get me again; not if I have to starve. I

nearly have starved, this winter, trying to keep out. I’ve peddled

shoes, run a baker’s cart, been janitor of a club-room and now I’m

carrying bricks! Maybe you don’t think it’s hard! I wish you had it to

go through. Perhaps you have, only your hands arn’t spoiled like mine

with the frost. Even my feet are lame, this very minute, through frost.

I’m earning a dollar seventy-five a day: good pay, but I shouldn’t

last more than a few years at it and then----. Besides, I want to get

married. She’s waiting. I’ve just got fifty dollars in the bank. Do you

wonder I feel so?”

On Christmas Sunday a blackboard in front of the church announced that

the “Rev. Albert Priddy, formerly of this church, will preach in the

morning and evening. Everybody Welcome!”

My uncle took me aside, in the morning, and said:

“I’m coming out to hear you, Al. Do your best, lad. I’ll be with you.

God knows I don’t deserve all this!”

It was a very simply arranged church; plain, white-washed walls, and

a cheaply carpeted platform. While the first hymn was being sung, my

Uncle Stanwood crept into a rear pew and kept his eyes down.

But while I preached, a half smile of pride stole into his face and to

my excited imagination his head seemed to be nodding approval to all I

said. The look in his eyes seemed to be saying, “Show them, Al!”

I whispered to the minister, “Let me pronounce the benediction and

while we are singing the last hymn, get down the aisle and meet my

uncle. He may get out before you. He’s timid.”

But Uncle Stanwood crept out before the benediction and I did not see

him again until my arrival home for dinner.

On arriving home, I was startled by what Aunt Millie did. She came up

to me, patted me lovingly on the head and said, “I’m glad you did so

well, Al. Your uncle’s been telling me all about it. I’ll go and hear

you tonight, too.”

Martin evidently was interested, for in that belligerent tone of his,

though softened by a light laugh, he said:

“I suppose I’ll have to go, too, seeing I’m his relation!”

I left the house that evening somewhat early, because I had to meet

some friends. Martin was blacking his shoes; Aunt Millie was troubling

herself unduly over what she should wear: a superfluous question, as

she had but one Sunday dress and hat.

On my way to church that night, I could not help feeling that I must

have misunderstood my aunt. I chided myself for not having read her

aright. I began to realize that there was a deep under-current to her

nature--perhaps one of love?

It was a thought like that that proved my best girding for the evening

sermon. I sat in the pulpit while the church filled; for this evening

service was always well attended. The choir of mill boys and girls, led

by a patriarchal man whose face and hands were white as fuller’s earth,

sang stirring anthems in which we saw the Palestinian shepherds in mute

adoration of the stable miracle. The congregation sang, with great

unction, another Christmas theme. Martin’s head towered at the rear;

but I could find no trace of Aunt Millie.

After the service, and the greetings of old-time friends, I looked

about for Martin and Aunt Millie. I saw neither. It was somewhat late

when I arrived home. Aunt Millie was waiting for me with a troubled

face.

“You managed to hide yourself pretty well!” I laughed.

She cried as she confessed:

“I didn’t go, Al. I didn’t hear you at all. That’s the plain truth!”

“Why, I thought I saw you getting ready when I left,” I said.

“Yes, I was; but I didn’t hear you preach. I couldn’t!”

“Oh,” I laughed, “you couldn’t? What was the matter?”

“I started out; but on the way I lost heart. I was afraid that I

might cry out in church, with you preaching, lad. Besides, I’m not

a dissenter. I was passing the Episcopal church and went in there,

instead. I felt more at home. You can understand, can’t you, lad?”

Then she asked me to sit on the sofa and tell her everything I had

spoken of in my sermon; not to miss a point, but to give it all. She

gave my points commendation, remarking every now and then while her

eyes brimmed with tears, “It must have done them good, that!”

Uncle sat at the lower end of the room, saying not a word; but

listening, carefully. In the midst of my report the front door opened,

and Martin, taking long, determined strides, hurried through the room

without looking at any of us, closed the kitchen door with a bang, and

left us looking into each other’s faces in bewilderment.

“Maybe he’s mad at something you said, Al. You didn’t chance to look

his way and talk of ‘coming to God,’ did you?”

I solemnly averred that I had not been so evangelical as that. My aunt

hurried into the kitchen where she lingered for a few moments. On her

return she said:

“It’s all right, Al. There’s nothing wrong. He’s just impressed by

hearing you preach, that’s all. He said to me, ‘If education can do

that, for a fellow, I want some of it!’”

The next morning a heavy snow was falling. Martin would have no work.

After breakfast he asked me if I would go into the parlor and have a

talk, he wanted to ask me something. I readily agreed.

The former antagonism had gone from his voice as he began to speak. His

words came quietly, curiously, like a child’s.

“Priddy, what can a chap learn to be in college?”

“What do you mean? What does a college fit men for?” I asked.

Martin nodded soberly, his eyes fixed on mine.

I laughed, “Oh, college will train you for almost any profession; that

is, the professional schools will. You can study to be a doctor, a

lawyer, a forester, a teacher--oh, anything you think of!”

“What do you think’s the best kind of a thing for a chap to be?”

“Why,” I replied, in embarrassment, “that depends upon the fellow, you

know.”

“Well,” said Martin, “what kind of a profession would you advise a chap

like me to take, for instance?”

I smiled, knowing what all this fencing meant. “Forestry is a good

profession, just now,” I advised. “It’s a new branch to the government

and brings in good money. I am sure you would like to be a forester.”

“What’s his work, especially?” came the question.

I explained, as best I knew, the different functions of a trained

forester, emphasizing, “Mind you, Martin, he’s paid for what he knows

and not what he does with his hands. He doesn’t have to chop down trees

and all that sort of stuff; but he knows all about saving the forests,

improving them, doctoring them.”

“How long does it take a man to learn that trade?” was the next

question.

“About seven years, including college and professional school.”

“It would take a fellow like me that long?”

“Oh,” I admitted, reluctantly, for I felt that this would put a stop

to any ambition that he had, “of course you are not ready for college.

That would mean at least three years more!”

Martin mused,

“Seven and three--ten. I’m twenty-eight years old. That would bring it

up to thirty-eight.”

“Yes,” I assented, “but you must remember that there are a good many

working years left, after that!”

“I’m not thinking about myself; it’s Nora. We planned to get married by

spring. Of course I should put it off. I wonder if you’d help me?”

“Help you--how--what?”

“Help me to explain to Nora; so she’ll wait--wait probably that long!”

“You can count on me to help you in anything, Martin.”

“When she knows it’s for her betterment, maybe she’ll be willing,”

interjected Martin, as if in argument with himself.

I nodded, vigorously.

“Anyway,” he said with that belligerent tone of his, “she’ll have to

be!”

Under the inspiration of this conversation, I pulled Martin out of the

house and took him to the public library, where we asked for a bundle

of preparatory school and college catalogues. These we whispered over

and patiently studied until noon. We found that, by unusual labor,

it would be possible for Martin to get his preparation, his college

degree, and his professional training within nine years! As a further

proof of our optimism, we decided that Martin should enter Yale when he

was fitted!

We found from the catalogue of the preparatory school that Martin had

decided upon, that the term opened within two days. When I advised

Martin to write a letter to the principal and await a reply, he stormed

at me:

“And probably it would be a week before I heard from him. That would

put me behind the classes--and you would be gone, too. If they aren’t

overcrowded, why, I’ll not wait to write; but just take my fifty

dollars and go. They can only say no.”

His decision made, Martin began to show me what a decided nature he

possessed. He drew the fifty dollars out of the bank. He bought some

necessary clothes out of the money. The next day he gave notice to the

contractor that he would carry bricks no more. Then he outlined his

scheme to uncle and aunt.

My Aunt Millie stormed.

“This education business is getting on my nerves. First it’s one and

then another of you.” Turning on me she said, “Nice way of treating us:

coming to take a good paying boarder from us--and we need the money so,

too!”

But Martin interjected, “Look here, I did it all myself. Blame me for

it!”

But my aunt would not be consoled. “And I’d been planning so for the

wedding, too!” she exclaimed.

As I chanced to be going on a trip to the Seminary at the time, I told

Martin that I could be his companion as far as he had to go.

“But you’ve got to go to the North End with me and help me explain

matters to Nora. You’ve got a smoother tongue than I have and she’ll

listen to you.”

So Martin and I started out on our dismal mission. Nora lived on the

top floor in one of the tenements. She was a stout, fair-faced woman

of twenty-seven with a way of casting her head sidewise when she spoke

to me, as if she had trouble with her sight. She stood gazing at us,

at that unexpected hour, from behind the ironing-board. The odor of

burning cloth reached my nostrils, as she stood wondering. She had

burnt the shirtwaist and no amount of frantic rubbing with soap could

take the scar out.

She dismissed us to the parlor while she put on a more presentable

dress. Martin said not a word to me; but he pointed dumbly to his

photograph in a place of honor on the mantel.

Nora came into the room exclaiming:

“Why, Martin, didn’t you let me know? What’s the matter?”

Martin started to speak; but could not. He nodded to me.

Carefully, painfully, hesitantly, I outlined Martin’s ambition to

Nora. More than that I explained the reasonableness of it, the prime

importance of it to their later fortunes. I tried to paint in glowing

terms the high station to which Nora, through Martin, might be exalted.

I leaped from point to point with enthusiastic eloquence, when the

theme had mastered me. But when I had concluded, and was looking

eagerly into the young woman’s face for a favorable sign, she gasped,

then in a cold voice she said:

“Oh, yes, it’s all right for _him_; but don’t I know that if he goes to

college he’ll meet other girls, better looking, better dressed, better

educated than I am, or can ever hope to be. Suppose I don’t break off

this engagement now, how am I to know that he’ll not forget me, throw

me over. Have you thought of that in all your plans?”

“Martin’s a man of his word, I suppose,” I protested.

“You’d find me true, Nora,” declared Martin.

“How long do you want me to wait?” demanded the girl.

“Only about seven or eight years or so!” haltingly explained Martin.

Nora leaped to her feet and stamped the floor, angrily, imperatively.

“You’d keep me waiting seven or eight years; waiting that long for you,

with all the risk! Not me! _Not for a thousand Martins!_”

That was her answer. We left her without more words. We left her

watching us, crying. Martin commented, when we were outside:

“Now, if she’d only had more faith in me and made me feel certain

of victory, maybe I’d given the whole thing up; but now--we’ll go

tomorrow, sure!”

The following evening we sat in the North Station in Boston, awaiting

the train that would carry us on an all-night journey. Every nerve

Martin possessed quivered with pessimism. He scolded, chided, lodged

complaints at everything and everybody. He tried to give me the

impression that I had made a prisoner of him; that he no longer had

any initiative of his own. As we sat in the waiting room he held

humorous monologues the purport of each one being, “What a fool I

am, at my age, to be running out among a lot of kids to get ready for

college. What a fool!” During that hour’s wait, he had resolved four

times to expend that fifty dollars in a ticket to the orange groves

of California. Finally, when he had been brooding in silence for some

moments, with a quick action he pulled out his pocket book, handed it

to me and said, savagely, “Here, take this and keep it safe. No matter

how I beg or what I say, don’t let me have it. To make things sure,

you’d better run and get me my ticket to the school; then I’ll be sure

and not turn back!”

As our train started from the station it plunged into a heavy, blinding

snow-storm that had been raging throughout the entire day. Once in our

seats, Martin recommenced his tirades against this “foolishness.” But

there were propitious signs near at hand, for his encouragement. A man

was coming down the aisle looking for a seat in whom I recognized a

Seminary comrade of mine. He was a stubby fellow of middle age, with an

ill-kept, drooping moustache.

“Say, Harlan, old fellow,” I greeted, “stop right here and meet my

cousin.” When he was seated, I talked with him, and, for Martin’s

benefit, to whom I slyly winked as I talked, brought out the fact that

Harlan had been much older than my cousin when he had started out for

an education. Nay, he had been handicapped with a wife and a child! Now

he enjoyed the dignity of the ministerial profession. The moral was

evident to Martin. He braced up and became very agreeable, especially

to my old friend Harlan.

We talked in low tones until three o’clock in the morning, at which

time the brakeman called out the station where I should leave Martin

to his fortunes. The poor fellow seemed on the verge of tears as he

gripped his suit-case and followed me to the door as the train slacked

up its speed. I looked off from the platform. The storm had not abated.

I could see only a great snowdrift where the station platform should

have been. A street light flickered weakly out on the street.

As Martin dropped up to his knees in the snowdrift and reached for his

suit-case I whispered:

“Find a hotel, and let me hear from you, old fellow. Keep up your

courage. If there’s anything I can do, call on me!” Harlan waved his

hand and called, “Never too late to mend!” an aphorism which might have

been pertinent to the occasion, and then the brakeman’s lantern swung.

As the train lumbered through the drifts, I saw Martin bend his head to

the storm, lift his suit-case above the drifts, and go plodding towards

the street light. The station was deserted, and I hoped that my cousin

would find some one to direct him before the storm discouraged him.

A few months later, I stopped off at the town where I had left my

cousin. He met me at the train, the same serious man I had left, though

with a trace of a smile on his face and more of content in his speech

than before. He guided me past a grocery store and said:

“I get up at four in the morning, do my studying, then before classes I

go out and take orders for that firm.”

He led me down a placid street, through the shovelled paths of snow,

and after opening the front door led me into a well-warmed and very

nicely furnished chamber.

“I do their chores and earn the rent for this room,” he announced, with

a grim smile. “Furnace to look after, paths to shovel, and baby to keep

happy, if it wakens when they want to go to an entertainment.”

At supper time he led me into the heart of the town into an

eating-house. He had a meal ticket punched by the waitress.

“This ticket costs three dollars,” he said, “enough to last a week at

three meals a day. I make it last three weeks by scrimping and having a

bottle of milk a day in my room.”

“How do you like the school?” I asked, pleased with these evidences of

his thrift.

“Well,” he mused, “they are a lot of kids, to be sure, and I’m quite

a freak among them. ‘Grandad’ Martin they call me. I suppose they’ve

never had so old a man in their classes before. Anyhow, that’s the

way you would argue from their looks and talk. But it doesn’t bother

me--much. I guess we’ll all get used to it, by and by.”

“How is Nora getting along?” I ventured to enquire.

“Married!” he snarled, and talked no more about that.

“What do you think about this opportunity, Martin?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for fifty weddings!” he declared.

Throughout the year I received word from him, couched in various

tempers of letters. Sometimes he was about to throw the whole ambition

over, because as he wrote, his mind was not as fresh as it might be.

Then he would write that the boys wanted him to become a member of

the basket-ball team, but he had refused, because, he argued, so old

a man, and so tall a one, would not do in playing against sixteen and

eighteen-year-olds! In spring, he had trouble with his French. Then

a complication of physical troubles cropped out, as if to test his

patience. Finally, after being confined to his bed by illness, and

having had to forego the final examinations, he decided that he was too

old to keep at it, and that he had too many handicaps. He went to the

West, thus keeping to his old intention, and after he had secured the

position as “boss” of a large gang of men, on construction work, a

“shirt-sleeved, and white collar job” as he termed it, he wrote to me

the following letter.

“MY DEAR COUSIN:

“Don’t feel at all that you did me a bad turn by having me go to that

school for a year. It was the most profitable investment I have ever

made! I find that out more and more each day. It has released me,

perhaps forever, from that miserable hand drudgery I always hated,

for in that single year’s contact with polite speech, with teachers,

and with the finer opportunities of life, I was given more confidence

in myself and my opportunities. I am not afraid to approach educated

people any more. I hold my head up higher; I feel myself more of a

_man_. I can even write at the end of my letter, something impossible

before, ‘_Remunda de pasturaje hace becerros gordos_,’ which is a

Spanish proverb out here for, ‘Change of pasture makes fat calves!’

God bless our schools!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.