“The time will come,” he threatened, “when some younger man will want my professorship—­and will deserve it.  I shall either be put out or I shall go out; and then—­decrepitude, uselessness, penury, unless something has been hoarded.  So, Anna, out of the frail uncertain little basketful of the apples of life which the college authorities present to me once a year, we must save a few for what may prove a long hard winter.”

Professor Hardage was a man somewhat past fifty, of ordinary stature and heavy figure, topped with an immense head.  His was not what we call rather vaguely the American face.  In Germany had he been seen issuing from the lecture rooms of a university, he would have been thought at home and his general status had been assumed:  there being that about him which bespoke the scholar, one of those quiet self-effacing minds that have long since passed with entire humility into the service of vast themes.  In social life the character of a noble master will in time stamp itself upon the look and manners of a domestic; and in time the student acquires the lofty hall-mark of what he serves.

It was this perhaps that immediately distinguished him and set him apart in every company.  The appreciative observer said at once:  “Here is a man who may not himself be great; but he is at least great enough to understand greatness; he is used to greatness.”

As so often is the case with the strong American, he was self-made—­that glory of our boasting.  But we sometimes forget that an early life of hardship, while it may bring out what is best in a man, so often wastes up his strength and burns his ambition to ashes in the fierce fight against odds too great.  So that the powers which should have carried him far carry him only a little distance or leave him standing exhausted where he began.

When Alfred Hardage was eighteen, he had turned his eyes toward a professorship in one of the great universities of his country; before he was thirty he had won a professorship in the small but respectable college of his native town; and now, when past fifty, he had never won anything more.  For him ambition was like the deserted martin box in the corner of his yard:  returning summers brought no more birds.  Had his abilities been even more extraordinary, the result could not have been far otherwise.  He had been compelled to forego for himself as a student the highest university training, and afterward to win such position as the world accorded him without the prestige of study abroad.

It became his duty in his place to teach the Greek language and its literature; sometimes were added classes in Latin.  This was the easier problem.  The more difficult problem grew out of the demand, that he should live intimately in a world of much littleness and not himself become little; feel interested in trivial minds at street corners, yet remain companion and critic of some of the greatest intellects of human kind; contend with occasional malice and jealousy in the college faculty, yet hold himself above these carrion passions; retain his intellectual manhood, yet have his courses of study narrowed and made superficial for him; be free yet submit to be patronized by some of his fellow-citizens, because they did him the honor to employ him for so much as a year as sage and moral exampler to their sons.