The president of that date was, like all the other presidents of Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years.  He was vastly amused at the inexperienced young fellow’s simple-minded notion, and, clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian rotundity:  “Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence.  Your proposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and I shall see that it is accepted.  However, I am willing to lay a wager with you that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed from your contract.”

J.M., trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president’s speech beyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried to stammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause.  He made no attempt to contradict the president’s confident prophecies; he only made the greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home.  His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and, looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision of his future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his.

Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer.  The head of his college and one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and joked him about the Wanderlust which would some day sweep him away from his old moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him and make a man of him.  He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watching through mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world, which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the library door.  He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessary trips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for the library.

He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the utter metamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave him change enough.  Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the younger professors who had acquired an odd taste for old J.M.’s society, confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place to which he could go, except to his childhood home.  He said he couldn’t bear to go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob him of his old memories, the dearest—­in fact the only possessions of his heart.  After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found the little old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure:  “Do you know, Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life—­and yet not at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life or the vulgar excitement of being in love.  All that kind of thing seems as distasteful to me now as ever.”