le-minded notion, and,
clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian
rotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have
temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can
contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Your
proposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and I
shall see that it is accepted. However, I am willing to lay a wager with
you that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed from
your contract."

J.M., trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president's speech
beyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried to
stammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause. He made no
attempt to contradict the president's confident prophecies; he only made
the greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home.
His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and,
looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision of
his future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his.

Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer. The head of his college
and one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and joked
him about the _Wanderlust_ which would some day sweep him away from his
old moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him and
make a man of him. He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watching
through mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world,
which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the library
door. He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessary
trips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for the
library.

He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the utter
metamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave him
change enough. Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the younger
professors who had acquired an odd taste for old J.M.'s society,
confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place to
which he could go, except to his childhood home. He said he couldn't bear
to go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob him
of his old memories, the dearest--in fact the only possessions of his
heart. After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found the
little old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure: