This is no tale of the inner life of an American university.  It is but a brief summary of young Harlson’s ways there.  But some day, I hope, a Thomas Hughes will come who will write the story, which can be made as healthful as “Tom Brown,” though it will have a different flavor.  What a chance for character study!  What opportunity for an Iliad of many a gallant struggle!  Valuable only in a lesser degree than what is learned from books is what is learned from men in college, that is, from young men, and herein lies the greater merit of the greater place.  In the little college, however high the grade of study, there is a lack of one thing broadening, a lack of acquaintance with the youth of many regions.  The living together of a thousand hailing from Maine or California, or Oregon or Florida, or Canada or England, young men of the same general grade and having the same general object, is a great thing for them all.  It obliterates the prejudice of locality, and gives to each the key-note of the region of another.  It builds up an acquaintance among those who will be regulating a land’s affairs from different vantage-grounds in years to come, and has its most practical utility in this.  When men meet to nominate a President this fact comes out most strongly.  The man from Texas makes a combination with the man from Michigan, and two delegations swing together, for have not these two men well known each other since the day their classes met in a rush upon the campus twenty years ago?

No studious recluse was Harlson.  His backwoods training would not allow of that.  In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen, it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome experience—­for they hazed then vigorously—­he was a factor, and beefsteak had been bound upon his cheek on more than one occasion.  A rollicking class was his, though not below the average in its scholarship, and the sometimes reckless mood of it just suited him.  “There were three men of Babylon, of Babylon, of Babylon.”

There is what some claim is an aristocracy in American colleges.  It is asserted that the leading Greek fraternities are this, and that the existence of Alpha Delta Phi, Psi Upsilon or Delta Kappa Epsilon, or others of the secret groups, is not a good thing for the students as a whole.  Yet in the existence of these societies is forged another of the links of life to come outside, and all the good things to be gained in college are not the ratings won in classes.  Harlson was one of those with badges and deep in college politics.  He never had occasion to repent it.

And so, with study, some rough encounter and much scheming and much dreaming, time passed until the world outside loomed up again at close quarters.  The present view was a new struggle.  The great money question intervened.  There had come a blight upon his father’s dollar crop, and when Grant Harlson left the university he was so nearly penniless that the books he owned were sold to pay his railroad fare.