s no fool, if I did go off owing him four dollars. To the credit of
human nature, let me here record that the fellows were touched by this
remark reflecting upon my memory, and immediately made up a purse and
paid the bill,--that is, they told the old man to charge it over to
them. College boys are rich in credit and the possibilities of life.

It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this
probation. So far as I could see, everything went on as if I were there,
or had never been there. I could not even see the place where I had
dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I heard my name, but I must say
that four weeks was quite long enough to stay in a world that had pretty
much forgotten me. There is no great satisfaction in being dragged up to
light now and then, like an old letter. The case was somewhat different
with the people with whom I had boarded. They were relations of mine,
and I often saw them weep, and they talked of me a good deal at
twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest one, Carrie, who was
handsomer than any one I knew, and not much older than I. I never used
to imagine that she cared particularly for me, nor would she have done
so, if I had lived, but death brought with it a sort of sentimental
regret, which, with the help of a daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a
little passion. I spent most of my time there, for it was more congenial
than the college.

But time hastened. The last sand of probation leaked out of the glass.
One day, while Carrie played (for me, though she knew it not) one of
Mendelssohn's "songs without words," I suddenly, yet gently, without
self-effort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the air, rose
higher, higher, by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet inconceivably rapid
motion. The ecstasy of that triumphant flight! Groves, trees, houses,
the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away beneath me. Upward mounting, as
on angels' wings, with no effort, till the earth hung beneath me a round
black ball swinging, remote, in the universal ether. Upward mounting,
till the earth, no longer bathed in the sun's rays, went out to my
sight, disappeared in the blank. Constellations, before seen from afar,
I sailed among stars, too remote for shining on earth, I neared, and
found to be round globes flying through space with a velocity only
equaled by my own. New worlds continually opened on my sight; newfields
of everlasting space opened and closed behind me