all. They are the lowest in New York. Smart private schools
will charge five or six hundred dollars a year."

Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone for
the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at the
pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped the
half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown to
me. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenile
education in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I knew the
secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child is not a
fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a
splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered upon
hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction,
when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways of
dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of a
magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally
lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and
glances down confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't?

* * * * *

It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace
Mann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit of
inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in
the Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived me
of its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compare
Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in
their towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison.

I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before
anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had
already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and
classes were over. I saw five or more universities while I was in
America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of
instruction. What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine,
the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.

And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling
promise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other
than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have
been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Building
after building,