never failed, it seemed, to catch and linger on the lonely, still figure clinging to the steps.  Soon there was a rush of feet downstairs, and a crowd of boys emerged and started briskly for breakfast.  Girls began to appear—­short-skirted, with and without hats, with hair up and hair down—­more girls than he had ever seen before—­tall and short, fat and thin, and brunette and blonde.  Students began to stroll through the campus gates, and now and then a buggy or a carriage would enter and whisk past him to deposit its occupants in front of the building opposite from where he sat.  What was going on over there?  He wanted to go over and see, for school might be taking up over there, and, from being too early, he might be too late after all; but he might miss John Burnham, and if he himself were late, why lots of the boys and girls about him would be late too, and surely if they knew, which they must, they would not let that happen.  So, all eyes, he sat on, taking in everything, like the lens of a camera.  Some of the boys wore caps, or little white hats with the crown pushed in all around, and, though it wasn’t muddy and didn’t look as though it were going to rain, each one of them had his “britches” turned up, and that puzzled the mountain boy sorely; but no matter why they did it, he wouldn’t have to turn his up, for they didn’t come to the tops of his shoes.  Swiftly he gathered how different he himself was, particularly in clothes, from all of them.  Nowhere did he see a boy who matched himself as so lonely and set apart, but with a shake of his head he tossed off his inner plea for sympathetic companionship, and the little uneasiness creeping over him—­proudly.  There was a little commotion now in the crowd nearest him, all heads turned one way, and Jason saw approaching an old gentleman on crutches, a man with a thin face that was all pure intellect and abnormally keen; that, centuries old in thought, had yet the unquenchable soul-fire of youth.  He stopped, lifted his hat in response to the cheers that greeted him, and for a single instant over that thin face played, like the winking eye of summer lightning, the subtle humor that the world over is always playing hide-and-seek in the heart of the Scot.  A moment, and Jason halted a passing boy with his eye.

“Who’s that ole feller?” he blurted.

The lad looked shocked, for he could not know that Jason meant not a particle of disrespect.

“That ‘ole feller,’” he mimicked indignantly and with scathing sarcasm, “is the president of this university”; and he hurried on while Jason miserably shrivelled closer to the steps.  After that he spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to him, and he lifted his eyes only to the gateway through which he longed for John Burnham to come.  But the smile of the old president haunted him.  There sat a man on heights no more to be scaled by him than heaven, and yet that puzzling smile for the blissful ignorance, in the young, of how gladly the