n whose weather-stained decks great
captains of learning have fought away their lives,--nor yet the
cavernous, quadrangular courts that sleep under the dingy walls of the
Sorbonne.

The youth-dreams of Clarence begin under the roof of one of those long,
ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New
England.

The floor of the room is rough, and divided by wide seams. The
study-table does not stand firmly without a few spare pennies to prop it
into solid footing. The bookcase of stained fir-wood, suspended against
the wall by cords, is meagrely stocked with a couple of Lexicons, a pair
of Grammars, a Euclid, a Xenophon, a Homer, and a Livy. Beside these are
scattered about here and there a thumb-worn copy of British ballads, an
odd volume of the "Sketch-Book," a clumsy Shakspeare, and a pocket
edition of the Bible.

With such appliances, added to the half-score of professors and tutors
who preside over the awful precincts, you are to work your way up to
that proud entrance upon our American life which begins with the
Baccalaureate degree. There is a tingling sensation in first walking
under the shadow of those walls, uncouth as they are, and in feeling
that you belong to them,--that you are a member, as it were, of the
body-corporate, subject to an actual code of printed laws, and to actual
moneyed fines varying from a shilling to fifty cents!

There is something exhilarating in the very consciousness of your
subject state, and in the necessity of measuring your hours by the habit
of such a learned community. You think back upon your respect for the
lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even
the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when
compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present
position.

It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about
you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already. Your chum, a
hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his
tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor. You
watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with
a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.

It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the
alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that
cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter. Yet with what a dreamy
horror you wake on mor