d 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 endeavor, 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
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.

When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he