Something is wrong!—­I said to myself, when I noticed his expression.—­Well, Mr. Langdon,—­I said to him, when we were alone,—­can I do anything for you to-day?

You can, Sir,—­he said.—­I am going to leave the class, for the present, and keep school.

Why, that ’s a pity, and you so near graduating!  You’d better stay and finish this course and take your degree in the spring, rather than break up your whole plan of study.

I can’t help myself, Sir,—­the young man answered.—­There ’s trouble at home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done.  So I must look out for myself for a while.  It’s what I’ve done before, and am ready to do again.  I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that.  Are you willing to give it to me?

Willing?  Yes, to be sure,—­but I don’t want you to go.  Stay; we’ll make it easy for you.  There’s a fund will do something for you, perhaps.  Then you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,—­and claim them in money, if you want that more than medals.

I have thought it all over,—­he answered,—­and have pretty much made up my mind to go.

A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild utterance, but means at least as much as he says.  There are some people whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual under-statement.  I often tell Mrs. Professor that one of her “I think it’s sos” is worth the Bible-oath of all the rest of the household that they “know it’s so.”  When you find a person a little better than his word, a little more liberal than his promise, a little more than borne out in his statement by his facts, a little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of eloquence in that person’s utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.

This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with family-recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid which many students would have thankfully welcomed.  I knew him too well to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined to go.  Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an early period.  When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away timid adventurers.  I have seen young men more than once, who came to a great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for their education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to travel, and establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of any person which they had not earned.  But these are exceptional cases.  There are horse-tamers, born so,—­as we all know; there are woman-tamers, who bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers, who can make any community, even a Yankee one, get down and let them jump on its back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.