paved lobby
and smoked cigarettes. This was liberty indeed! At length we departed for
Cambridge, in another herdic.

Boston! Could it be possible? Everything was so different here as to give
the place the aspect of a dream: the Bulfinch State House, the decorous
shops, the still more decorous dwellings with the purple-paned windows
facing the Common; Back Bay, still boarded up, ivy-spread, suggestive of
a mysterious and delectable existence. We crossed the Charles River,
blue-grey and still that morning; traversed a nondescript district, and
at last found ourselves gazing out of the windows at the mellowed,
plum-coloured bricks of the University buildings.... All at once our
exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a side street and
backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting, three-storied house with
a queer extension on top. Its steps and vestibule were, however,
immaculate. The bell was answered by a plainly overworked servant girl,
of whom we inquired for Mrs. Bolton, our landlady. There followed a
period of waiting in a parlour from which the light had been almost
wholly banished, with slippery horsehair furniture and a marble-topped
table; and Mrs. Bolton, when she appeared, dressed in rusty black,
harmonized perfectly with the funereal gloom. She was a tall, rawboned,
severe lady with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that somehow reminded
one of the outcropping rocks of her native New England soil.

"You want to see your rooms, I suppose," she remarked impassively when we
had introduced ourselves, and as we mounted the stairs behind her Tom, in
a whisper, nicknamed her "Granite Face." Presently she left us.

"Hospitable soul!" said Tom, who, with his hands in his pockets, was
gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room. "We'll have to go into the
house-furnishing business, Hughie. I vote we don't linger here
to-day--we'll get melancholia."

Outside, however, the sun was shining brightly, and we departed
immediately to explore Cambridge and announce our important presences to
the proper authorities.... We went into Boston to dine.... It was not
until nine o'clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom
suddenly dropped out of things. He who has tasted that first, acute
homesickness of college will know what I mean. It usually comes at the
opening of one's trunk. The sight of the top tray gave me a pang I shall
never forget. I would not have believed that I loved my mother so much!
These