The class in advance you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about your own age.  The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings to the time when you too shall be admitted freely to the precincts of the Philosophical chamber, and to the very steep benches of the Laboratory.  This last seems, from occasional peeps through the blinds, a most mysterious building.  The chimneys, recesses, vats, and cisterns—­to say nothing of certain galvanic communications, which, you are told, traverse the whole building in a way capable of killing a rat at an incredible remove from the bland professor—­utterly fatigue your wonder!  You humbly trust—­though you have doubts upon the point—­that you will have the capacity to grasp it all, when once you shall have arrived at the dignity of a Junior.

As for the Seniors, your admiration for them is entirely boundless.  In one or two individual instances, it is true, it has been broken down by an unfortunate squabble with thick-set fellows in the Chapel aisle.  A person who sits not far before you at prayers, and whose name you seek out very early, bears a strong resemblance to some portrait of Dr. Johnson; you have very much the same kind of respect for him that you feel for the great lexicographer, and do not for a moment doubt his capacity to compile a dictionary equal, if not superior, to Johnson’s.

Another man with very bushy, black hair, and an easy look of importance, carries a large cane, and is represented to you as an astonishing scholar and speaker.  You do not doubt it; his very air proclaims it.  You think of him as presently—­(say four or five years hence)—­astounding the United States Senate with his eloquence.  And when once you have heard him in debate, with that ineffable gesture of his, you absolutely languish in your admiration for him, and you describe his speaking to your country friends as very little inferior, if at all, to Mr. Burke’s.  Beside this one are some half dozen others, among whom the question of superiority is, you understand, strongly mooted.  It puzzles you to think, what an avalanche of talent will fall upon the country at the graduation of those Seniors!

You will find however that the country bears such inundations of college talent with a remarkable degree of equanimity.  It is quite wonderful how all the Burkes, and Scotts, and Peels, among college Seniors, do quietly disappear, as a man gets on in life.

As for any degree of fellowship with such giants, it is an honor hardly to be thought of.  But you have a classmate—­I will call him Dalton—­who is very intimate with a dashing Senior; they room near each other outside the college.  You quite envy Dalton, and you come to know him well.  He says that you are not a “green-one,”—­that you have “cut your eye-teeth”; in return for which complimentary opinions you entertain a strong friendship for Dalton.