d who have rested their brains this way for over thirty
years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed up is said to be
colossal.

I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of
the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that
the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that.
Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. "We go over to his
rooms," said one student, "and he just lights a pipe and talks to us."
"We sit round with him," said another, "and he simply smokes and goes
over our exercises with us." From this and other evidence I gather that
what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together
and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four
years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go to
Oxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well-smoked man
speaks, and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other
way.

In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism against
the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of doing so. For
the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I have nothing but
a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest difference between the
modern up-to-date American idea of a professor and the English type. But
even with us in older days, in the bygone time when such people as Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow were professors, one found the English idea; a
professor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-white
whiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected to moon around the
campus oblivious of the world around him. If you nodded to him he failed
to see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, as
his trustees were proud to say of him, "a child."

On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning of
such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning was
supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its use
was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind.

At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was even
whiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater, and
whose knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs was below
zero. Him they made the president.

All this is changed in America. A university professor is now a busy,
hustling person, approximating as closely to a busines