imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious
look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it
again. When he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged
strength. It was a hard struggle, for things did not come easily to
him,--few crowding memories of early life and teaching came to help him
on his new way; but all the world toward which he strove was of his own
building, and he builded slow and hard. As the light dawned
lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the
vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through and
beyond the world of men into a world of thought. And the thoughts at
times puzzled him sorely; he could not see just why the circle was not
square, and carried it out fifty-six decimal places one
midnight,--would have gone further, indeed, had not the matron rapped
for lights out. He caught terrible colds lying on his back in the
meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave
doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected the
Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he
pondered long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this meant
that and why it couldn't mean something else, and how it must have felt
to think all things in Greek. So he thought and puzzled along for
himself,--pausing perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking
steadily through the difficulties where the rest stopped and
surrendered.

Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow
and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and
collars got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new
dignity crept into his walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness
growing in his eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy.
Thus he passed out of the preparatory school into college, and we who
watched him felt four more years of change, which almost transformed
the tall, grave man who bowed to us commencement morning. He had left
his queer thought-world and come back to a world of motion and of men.
He looked now for the first time sharply about him, and wondered he had
seen so little before. He grew slowly to feel almost for the first
time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first
noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before,
differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights tha