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 that urged the monks of the olden time to turn their backs upon the world and bury themselves in cloisters were praiseworthy:  but for such havens of peace, letters might have perished.  When the Reformation was carried out in England, and the sequestration of Church property left immense convents idle, it was only natural that the newly-established colleges and halls should convert the buildings to their own uses.  The dormitory system of Oxford and Cambridge, accordingly, has an historic right of being; and, growing by natural laws, it has become so rooted in the national life that nothing short of a political revolution, greater even than that of the seventeenth century, could eradicate it.  The founders of our earliest colleges were governed by the desire to make them conform as closely as might be to the English model.  There is scarcely the