Boston!  Could it be possible?  Everything was so different here as to give the place the aspect of a dream:  the Bulfinch State House, the decorous shops, the still more decorous dwellings with the purple-paned windows facing the Common; Back Bay, still boarded up, ivy-spread, suggestive of a mysterious and delectable existence.  We crossed the Charles River, blue-grey and still that morning; traversed a nondescript district, and at last found ourselves gazing out of the windows at the mellowed, plum-coloured bricks of the University buildings....  All at once our exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a side street and backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting, three-storied house with a queer extension on top.  Its steps and vestibule were, however, immaculate.  The bell was answered by a plainly overworked servant girl, of whom we inquired for Mrs. Bolton, our landlady.  There followed a period of waiting in a parlour from which the light had been almost wholly banished, with slippery horsehair furniture and a marble-topped table; and Mrs. Bolton, when she appeared, dressed in rusty black, harmonized perfectly with the funereal gloom.  She was a tall, rawboned, severe lady with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that somehow reminded one of the outcropping rocks of her native New England soil.

“You want to see your rooms, I suppose,” she remarked impassively when we had introduced ourselves, and as we mounted the stairs behind her Tom, in a whisper, nicknamed her “Granite Face.”  Presently she left us.

“Hospitable soul!” said Tom, who, with his hands in his pockets, was gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room.  “We’ll have to go into the house-furnishing business, Hughie.  I vote we don’t linger here to-day—­we’ll get melancholia.”

Outside, however, the sun was shining brightly, and we departed immediately to explore Cambridge and announce our important presences to the proper authorities....  We went into Boston to dine....  It was not until nine o’clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom suddenly dropped out of things.  He who has tasted that first, acute homesickness of college will know what I mean.  It usually comes at the opening of one’s trunk.  The sight of the top tray gave me a pang I shall never forget.  I would not have believed that I loved my mother so much!  These articles had been packed by her hands; and in one corner, among the underclothes on which she had neatly sewed my initials, lay the new Bible she had bought.  “Hugh Moreton Paret, from his Mother.  September, 1881.”  I took it up (Tom was not looking) and tried to read a passage, but my eyes were blurred.  What was it within me that pressed and pressed until I thought I could bear the pain of it no longer?  I pictured the sitting-room at home, and my father and mother there, thinking of me.  Yes, I must acknowledge it; in the bitterness of that moment I longed to be back once more in the railed-off space on the floor of Breck and Company, writing invoices....