uous postures of youth. They
might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid
portraits by John Sargent.

The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very
different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved
wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall
seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed the
laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of me
instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of
butter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition
than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret
reality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not the
dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one
hundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanished
from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly they
were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--each
containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which I
understood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a very
clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its
extraordinary luxury.

And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student
actually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. I
regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been
contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been
followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his
portmanteau.

My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring,
suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat
that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it
seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical
apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word
that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I
find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most
sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening
to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mighty
talking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a
president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities,
science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely
make him