c towns.

One such I knew who met on one of these occasions a member of the
club for which she provided. The lady was charming, well-dressed,
well-mannered.

The young man, innocent of linen, had appeared at the levee in a gray
flannel shirt. Introductions passed. The lady bowed.

"I am happy," stammered the poor fellow, "I am happy to meet the woman
who cooks our victuals."

If it be asked, Why educate a man like that for the Christian
ministry?--but it was _not_ asked. Like all monstrosities, he grew
without permission.

Let us hasten to call him the exception that he was to what, on the
whole, was (in those days) a fair, wholesome rule of theological
selection. The Professor's eyes flashed when he heard the story.

"I have never approved," I think he said, "of the Special Course."

For the Professor believed in no short-cut to the pulpit; but pleaded
for all the education, all the opportunity, all the culture, all
the gifts, all the graces, possible to a man's privilege or energy,
whereby to fit him to preach the Christian religion. But, like other
professors, he could not always have his way.

It ought to be said, perhaps, that, beside the self-made or
self-making man, there always sat upon the old benches in the
lecture-room a certain proportion of gentlemen born and bred to ease
and affluence, who had chosen their life's work from motives which
were, at least, as much to be respected as the struggles of the
converted newsboy or the penitent expressman.

Take her at her dullest, I think we were very fond of Andover; and
though we dutifully improved our opportunities to present ourselves in
other circles of society, yet, like fisher-folk or mountain-folk, we
were always uneasy away from home. I remember on my first visit to
New York or Boston--and this although my father was with me--quietly
crying my eyes out behind the tall, embroidered screen which the
hostess moved before the grate, because the fire-light made me so
homesick. Who forgets his first attack of nostalgia? Alas! so far as
this recorder is concerned, the first was too far from the last. For
I am cursed (or blessed) with a love of home so inevitable and
so passionate as to be nothing less than ridiculous to my day and
generation--a day of rovers, a generation of shawl-straps and valises.

"Do you never want to _stay_?" I once asked a distinguished author
whose domestic uprootings were so frequent as to cause remark even in
America.

"I a