ff sea-ward with an expression of ineffably
mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again
formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a
certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great
and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters to create a
new world. I drew my gaze with difficulty from the heavens and turned
toward my companion.

He was gone. The sailors also had disappeared.

And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the Sunderbunds, at
my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most wondrous transformation
which the tricksy stage-carpenters and scene-shifters of the brain
have ever devised. For this same far-stretching horizon, which had
just been alluring my soul into the depths of the creative period,
suddenly contracted itself four-square into the somewhat yellowed
walls of a certain apartment which I need not now further designate,
and the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a
certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same yellowish
walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the birth of
continents degraded itself into a certain--or, I had more accurately
said, a very uncertain--cane chair, wherein I sit writing these lines
and mourning for my lost Bhima Gandharva.

THE COLLEGE STUDENT.

The most marked trait in American college life is its spirit of caste.
This same spirit, it is true, manifests itself in other lands--in
England, France and Germany. In fact, it reached its extreme
development in the last-named country: the very term _Philistia_ is of
German coinage. The causes that originated and kept alive this
spirit in Europe are obvious. During the Middle Ages students enjoyed
privileges such as made them, in the strictest legal sense, a distinct
class. Thus, they had the right to wear side-arms, and had their own
courts of justice. Some of these privileges have survived, in England
and Germany at least, to the present day. Yet even in Germany the old
student spirit is evidently on the wane, and is doomed to extinction
at a day not far distant. In America, on the contrary, where like
causes have never operated, the spirit exists in force. It is due
to peculiar causes--to college life, to locality and to the mode of
teaching.

The tendency to monkish seclusion lingers in England and America,
the lands that have led the van in political and social progress. The
motives tha