Yet there never was a more conscientious fellow than Ebenezer Skinner, Student in Divinity.  He studied all that he was told to study.  He read every book that by the regulations he was compelled to read.  But he read nothing besides.  He found that he could not hold his own in the give-and-take of his fellow-students’ conversation.  Therefore more and more he withdrew himself from them, crystallising into his narrow early conventions.  His college learning acted like an unventilated mackintosh, keeping all the unwholesome, morbid personality within, and shutting out the free ozone and healthy buffeting of the outer world.  Many college-bred men enter life with their minds carefully mackintoshed.  Generally they go into the Church.

But he found his way through his course somehow.  It was of him that Kelland, kindliest and most liberal of professors, said when the co-examiner hinted darkly of “spinning”:  “Poor fellow!  We’ll let him through.  He’s done his best.”  Then, after a pause, and in the most dulcet accents of a valetudinarian cherub, “It’s true, his best is not very good!”

But Ebenezer escaped from the logic class-room as a roof escapes from a summer shower, and gladly found himself on the more proper soil of the philosophy of morals.  Here he did indeed learn something, for the professor’s system was exactly suited to such as he.  In consequence, his notebooks were a marvel.  But he did not shine so brightly in the oral examinations, for he feared, with reason, the laughter of his fellows.  In English literature he took down all the dates.  But he did not attend the class on Fridays for fear he should be asked to read, so he never heard Masson declaim,

  “Ah, freedom is a noble thing!”

which some of his contemporaries consider the most valuable part of their university training.

After Ebenezer Skinner went to the Divinity Hall, he brought the same excellent qualities of perseverance to bear upon the work there.  When the memorable census was taken of a certain exegetical class, requesting that each student should truthfully, and upon his solemn oath, make record of his occupation at the moment when the paper reached him, he alone, an academic Abdiel,

  “Among the faithless, faithful only he,”

was able truthfully to report—­Name, “Ebenezer Skinner”; Occupation at this Moment, “Trying to attend to the lecture.”  His wicked companions—­who had returned themselves variously as “Reading the Scotsman,” “Writing a love-letter,” “Watching a fight between a spider and a bluebottle, spider weakening”—­saw at once that the future of a man who did not know any better than to listen to a discourse on Hermeneutics was entirely hopeless.  So henceforth they spoke of him openly and currently as “Poor Skinner!”