bbles; and it was well for the health of the Kingston Academy boys
that they rarely went around town except in groups of two or three;
and it was very bad for the health of any of the town fellows if they
happened to be caught within the Academy grounds.

The result of being situated in a half-dead village, which was neither
loved nor loving, did not make life at the Academy tame, but quite the
opposite; for the boys were forced to find their whole entertainment
in the Academy life, and in one another, and the campus was therefore
a little republic in itself--a Utopia. Like every other republic, it
had its cliques and its struggles, its victories and its defeats, its
friendships and its enmities, and everything else that makes life
lively and lifelike.

The campus was beautiful enough and large enough to accommodate its
citizens handsomely. Its trees were many and tall, venerable old
monarchs with foliage like tents for shade and comfort to any little
groups that cared to lounge upon the mossy divans beneath. The grounds
were spacious enough to furnish not only football and baseball fields
and tennis-courts, but meadows where wild flowers grew in the spring,
and a little lake where the ice grew in the winter. Miles away--just
enough to make a good "Sabbath day's journey"--was a wonderful region
called the "Ledges," where glaciers had once resided, and left huge
boulders, scratched and scarred. As Jumbo put it, it seemed, from
the chasms and caves and curious distortions of stone and soil, that
"nature must have once had a fit there.".

Most of the buildings of the Academy looked nearly old enough to have
been also deposited there by the primeval glaciers, but they were huge
and comfortable, and so many colonies of boys had romped and ruminated
there, and so much laughter and so much lore had soaked into the old
walls, that they were pleasanter than any newer and more gorgeous
architecture could possibly be. They were homely in the better as well
as the worse sense.

But this is more than enough description, and you must imagine for
yourselves how the Lakerim eleven, often as they thought of home, and
homesick as they were in spite of themselves now and then, rejoiced
in being thrown on their own resources, and made somewhat independent
citizens in a little country of their own. Unwilling to make
selections among themselves, more unwilling to select room-mates from
the other students (the "foreigners," as the Lakerim