It was a noble eulogy, and I felt before he finished, though I had misgivings at the beginning, that I deserved it all.  The effect on the audience was a little different.  They said it was a “strong” oration, and I think Timmins got more credit by it than I did.  After the performance they stood about the chapel, talking in a subdued tone, and seemed to be a good deal impressed by what they had heard, or perhaps by thoughts of the departed.  At least they all soon went over to Austin’s and called for beer.  My particular friends called for it twice.  Then they all lit pipes.  The old grocery keeper was good enough to say that I was no fool, if I did go off owing him four dollars.  To the credit of human nature, let me here record that the fellows were touched by this remark reflecting upon my memory, and immediately made up a purse and paid the bill,—­that is, they told the old man to charge it over to them.  College boys are rich in credit and the possibilities of life.

It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this probation.  So far as I could see, everything went on as if I were there, or had never been there.  I could not even see the place where I had dropped out of the ranks.  Occasionally I heard my name, but I must say that four weeks was quite long enough to stay in a world that had pretty much forgotten me.  There is no great satisfaction in being dragged up to light now and then, like an old letter.  The case was somewhat different with the people with whom I had boarded.  They were relations of mine, and I often saw them weep, and they talked of me a good deal at twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest one, Carrie, who was handsomer than any one I knew, and not much older than I. I never used to imagine that she cared particularly for me, nor would she have done so, if I had lived, but death brought with it a sort of sentimental regret, which, with the help of a daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a little passion.  I spent most of my time there, for it was more congenial than the college.

But time hastened.  The last sand of probation leaked out of the glass.  One day, while Carrie played (for me, though she knew it not) one of Mendelssohn’s “songs without words,” I suddenly, yet gently, without self-effort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the air, rose higher, higher, by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet inconceivably rapid motion.  The ecstasy of that triumphant flight!  Groves, trees, houses, the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away beneath me.  Upward mounting, as on angels’ wings, with no effort, till the earth hung beneath me a round black ball swinging, remote, in the universal ether.  Upward mounting, till the earth, no longer bathed in the sun’s rays, went out to my sight, disappeared in the blank.  Constellations, before seen from afar, I sailed among.  Stars, too remote for shining on earth, I neared, and found to be round globes flying through space with a velocity only equaled by my own.  New worlds continually opened on my sight; newfields of everlasting space opened and closed behind me.