to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work
as head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations, he was my examiner, and my course
was arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to
New England, and, except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in
Lincoln all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks
together. I shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as
one of the happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world
of ideas; when one first enters that world everything else fades for
a time, and all that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found
curious survivals; some of the figures of my old life seemed to be
waiting for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among the students
who had come up to the university from the farms and the little towns
scattered over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came
straight from the cornfields with only a summer's wages in their
pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and
completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors
were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer school-teachers, stranded
ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just out of
graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of expectancy
and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head
from the prairie only a few years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were
no college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took
rooms with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off
their children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of
town, near the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for
students, and on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My
bedroom, originally a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large
enough to contain my cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room
my study. The dres