A dismal state of lassitude follows, broken by the college-clock striking three, and by very rambling reflections upon champagne, Xenophon, “Captain Dick,” Madge, and the old deacon who clinched his wig in the church.

The next morning (ah, how vexatious that all our follies are followed by a “next morning!”) you wake with a parched mouth, and a torturing thirst; the sun is shining broadly into your reeking chamber.  Prayers and recitations are long ago over; and you see through the door in the outer room that hard-faced chum with his Lexicon and Livy open before him, working out with all the earnestness of his iron purpose the steady steps toward preferment and success.

You go with some story of sudden sickness to the tutor,—­half fearful that the bloodshot, swollen eyes will betray you.  It is very mortifying too to meet Dalton appearing so gay and lively after it all, while you wear such an air of being “used up.”  You envy him thoroughly the extraordinary capacity that he has.

Here and there creeps in, amid all the pride and shame of the new life, a tender thought of the old home; but its joys are joys no longer:  its highest aspirations even have resolved themselves into fine mist,—–­ like rainbows that the sun drinks with his beams.

The affection for a mother, whose kindness you recall with a suffused eye, is not gone, or blighted; but it is woven up, as only a single adorning tissue, into the growing pride of youth:  it is cherished in the proud soul rather as a redeeming weakness than as a vital energy.

And the love for Nelly, though it bates no jot of fervor, is woven into the scale of growing purposes rather as a color to adorn than as a strand to strengthen.

As for your other loves, those romantic ones which were kindled by bright eyes, and the stolen reading of Miss Porter’s novels, they linger on your mind like perfumes; and they float down your memory—­with the figure, the step, the last words of those young girls who raised them—­like the types of some dimly shadowed but deeper passion, which is some time to spur your maturer purposes and to quicken your manly resolves.

It would be hard to tell, for you do not as yet know, but that Madge herself—­hoidenish, blue-eyed Madge—­is to be the very one who will gain such hold upon your riper affections as she has held already over your boyish caprice.  It is a part of the pride—­I may say rather an evidence of the pride—­which youth feels in leaving boyhood behind him, to talk laughingly and carelessly of those attachments which made his young years so balmy with dreams.

II.

First Ambition.

I believe that sooner or later there come to every man dreams of ambition.  They may be covered with the sloth of habit, or with the pretence of humility; they may come only in dim, shadowy visions, that feed the eye like the glories of an ocean sunrise; but you may be sure that they will come:  even before one is aware, the bold, adventurous goddess, whose name is Ambition, and whose dower is Fame, will be toying with the feeble heart.  And she pushes her ventures with a bold hand; she makes timidity strong, and weakness valiant.