my own consciousness that I needed
that guidance.

College life is strange and solitary at these northern
universities--especially at those in the two great cities of Edinburgh
and Glasgow. The lad comes up knowing perhaps one other of his age and
standing. If he has a family one or two elder students will be ordered
by their people to look him up. Seldom do they repeat the visit. Their
circle is formed. They want no "yellow nebs."

For the rest he is alone, protected from the devil and the young lusts
of the flesh by the memory of his mother, perhaps by the remembrance
that about that time his father is striving hard to pinch to pay his
fees, but lastly, chiefly and most practically by those empty pockets.

If he have a family in the town, he is hardly a student like the others.
He has his comrades within cry, his houses of call, girls here and there
whom he has met at dances in friendly houses, sisters and cousins of his
own or of his friends--in short, all the machinery of social life to
carry him on.

But for the great majority life is other and sterner. As Milton
lamenting his blindness, the stranger student mourns wisdom and life "at
one entrance quite shut out." The influence of women, sweeter than that
of the Pleiades, is absent, save in the shape of seamy-faced
grim-mouthed landladies, or, in a favourable case, which was ours (or
might have been), our red-cheeked, frank-tongued, oncoming wench in the
milk-house at Echobank, and the baker's daughter across the way.

The first result of this is a great outbreak of sentimentality among the
callowlings. They have pictures (oh, such caricatures!) to carry in
breast-pockets--or locks of hair, like mine. Their hearts are
inflammable as those of the flaxen-haired youths I met afterwards in the
universities of Germany, only living on oatmeal, without sausages, and
less florid with beer. Yet on the whole, the aforesaid empty purse
aiding, we were filled with not dishonest sentiment, keen as
sleuth-hounds on the track of knowledge, and disputatious as only lads
of Calvinistic training can be.

Our landladies were much alike, our rooms furnished with the same
Spartan plainness. Only in Mistress Craven I happened on a good one, and
abode with her all the days of my stay at College, till the way opened
out for me to wider horizons and a humaner life.

But I can see the room yet, and the narrow passage which led to it.
Here, close to the door, was a clock with a stri