you are going to drift, Dodd?"
inquired Armstrong.

"Drift? Well, no; not exactly. I shall keep my steering apparatus well
in hand, but I haven't decided yet what port to run for. There's no
hurry. I have an uncle in the Northwest in the lumber business, who
would give me a chance. I may go out there and look about awhile at
first. If it doesn't promise much, there is the law to fall back upon.
My father has a fruit farm at Byzantium in western New York,--where I
come from, you know,--and he is part owner of the Byzantium weekly
'Bugle.' I've no doubt I could get on as editor, and go to the
Legislature. Or I might do worse than begin on the farm; farming is
looking up in that section. I may try several things till I find the
right one."

"That's queer," said Armstrong. "I thought you had made up your mind
to enter the Columbia Law School."

"Hardly," answered Doddridge, "though I may, after all. The main point
is to keep yourself in readiness for any work, and take the best thing
that turns up--like Berkeley here," he added, drily.

Armstrong looked at his watch and remarked that it was nearly
midnight.

"Boys," said I, "in fifteen years from to-night let's have a supper
here and see how each man of us has worked out his theory of life, and
how he likes it as far as he has got."

"Oh, give us twenty," said Doddridge, laughing, as we all arose and
prepared to break up. "No one accomplishes anything in this latitude
before he is forty."

* * * * *

It was in effect just fifteen years from the summer of our graduation
that I started out to look up systematically my quondam classmates and
compare notes with them. The course of my own life had been quite
other than I had planned. For one thing, I had lived in New Orleans
and not in New York, and my occasions had led me seldom to the North.
The first visit I paid was to Berkeley. I had heard that he was still
unmarried, and that he had been for years settled, as minister, over a
small Episcopal parish on the Hudson. The steamer landed me one summer
afternoon at a little dock on the west bank; and after obtaining from
the dock-keeper precise directions for finding the parsonage, I set
out on foot. After a walk of a mile along a road skirted by handsome
country seats, but contrasting strangely in its loneliness with the
broad thoroughfare of the river constantly occupied by long tows of
barges and rafts, I came to the rectory gate. The