I.

Cloister Life.

It has very likely occurred to you, my reader, that I am playing the wanton in these sketches, and am breaking through all the canons of the writers in making You my hero.

It is even so; for my work is a story of those vague feelings, doubts, passions, which belong more or less to every man of us all; and therefore it is that I lay upon your shoulders the burden of these dreams.  If this or that one never belonged to your experience, have patience for a while.  I feel sure that others are coming which will lie like a truth upon your heart, and draw you unwittingly—­perhaps tearfully even—­into the belief that You are indeed my hero.

The scene now changes to the cloister of a college; not the gray, classic cloisters which lie along the banks of the Cam or the Isis,—­huge, battered hulks, on whose weather-stained decks great captains of learning have fought away their lives,—­nor yet the cavernous, quadrangular courts that sleep under the dingy walls of the Sorbonne.

The youth-dreams of Clarence begin under the roof of one of those long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New England.

The floor of the room is rough, and divided by wide seams.  The study-table does not stand firmly without a few spare pennies to prop it into solid footing.  The bookcase of stained fir-wood, suspended against the wall by cords, is meagrely stocked with a couple of Lexicons, a pair of Grammars, a Euclid, a Xenophon, a Homer, and a Livy.  Beside these are scattered about here and there a thumb-worn copy of British ballads, an odd volume of the “Sketch-Book,” a clumsy Shakspeare, and a pocket edition of the Bible.

With such appliances, added to the half-score of professors and tutors who preside over the awful precincts, you are to work your way up to that proud entrance upon our American life which begins with the Baccalaureate degree.  There is a tingling sensation in first walking under the shadow of those walls, uncouth as they are, and in feeling that you belong to them,—­that you are a member, as it were, of the body-corporate, subject to an actual code of printed laws, and to actual moneyed fines varying from a shilling to fifty cents!

There is something exhilarating in the very consciousness of your subject state, and in the necessity of measuring your hours by the habit of such a learned community.  You think back upon your respect for the lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present position.

It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already.  Your chum, a hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor.  You watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.