I thanked him gratefully.

A famous artist, who started out in youth to embrace a military career and who failed to pass an examination at West Point, is said to have remarked that if silicon had been a gas he would have been a soldier.  I am afraid I may have given the impression that if I had not gone to Weathersfield and encountered Mr. Watling I might not have been a lawyer.  This impression would be misleading.  And while it is certain that I have not exaggerated the intensity of the spiritual experience I went through at Cambridge, a somewhat belated consideration for the truth compels me to register my belief that the mood would in any case have been ephemeral.  The poison generated by the struggle of my nature with its environment had sunk too deep, and the very education that was supposed to make a practical man of me had turned me into a sentimentalist.  I became, as will be seen, anything but a practical man in the true sense, though the world in which I had been brought up and continued to live deemed me such.  My father was greatly pleased when I wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come to my senses at last.  He had still been prepared to see me “go off at a tangent,” as he expressed it.  On the other hand, the powerful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be underestimated.  Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which had made its impression.  And when I returned to Cambridge Alonzo Cheyne knew that he had lost me....

I pass over the rest of my college course, and the years I spent at the Harvard Law School, where were instilled into me without difficulty the dictums that the law was the most important of all professions, that those who entered it were a priestly class set aside to guard from profanation that Ark of the Covenant, the Constitution of the United States.  In short, I was taught law precisely as I had been taught religion,—­scriptural infallibility over again,—­a static law and a static theology,—­a set of concepts that were supposed to be equal to any problems civilization would have to meet until the millennium.  What we are wont to call wisdom is often naively innocent of impending change.  It has no barometric properties.

I shall content myself with relating one incident only of this period.  In the January of my last year I went with a party of young men and girls to stay over Sunday at Beverly Farms, where Mrs. Fremantle—­a young Boston matron had opened her cottage for the occasion.  This “cottage,” a roomy, gabled structure, stood on a cliff, at the foot of which roared the wintry Atlantic, while we danced and popped corn before the open fires.  During the daylight hours we drove about the country in sleighs, or made ridiculous attempts to walk on snow-shoes.