fessorship?"

"My poor friend, you were at college four years, and graduated--without
honors, it is true. Don't you remember how little we cared for the
Profs. and their eminent attainments? We took it for granted that it was
all right, and they understood what they were at; but it was a grind, to
them and to us. If a man was an enthusiast for his branch, we rather
laughed at him; or if his name was well up, we were willing to be proud
of him--at a distance--as an honor to Alma Mater; but we kicked all the
same, if he tried to put extra work on us. It was all fashion, routine,
tradition. The student mind doesn't begin to look into things for itself
till about the senior year, and then it's full of what lies ahead, in
the great world outside--poor innocents! With those of us who had
anything in us, it took most of the time to knock the nonsense
out.--And then if a man wants a chair, he must take it in a western
concern, where he'll be expected to lead in prayer-meeting, and to have
no views of geology that conflict with the Catechism."

"Well then, why not go on with literature? That was in your line: you
might have made a good thing of it."

"Yes, by 'unremitting application,' much the same as at law, and taking
it seriously as a profession, I might in time possibly have made five
hundred a year off the magazines, and won an humble place among our
seven hundred rising authors. What's the good of that, when one is not a
transcendent genius, destined for posterity? The crowd seems to be
thickest just there: too many books, too many writers, and by far too
many anxious aspirants. Why should I swell the number? The community was
not especially pining to hear what I might have to say; and I did not
pine so much as some to be heard."

"I fear you lacked ambition, Harty. You would have made a pretty good
preacher; but I suppose you weren't sanctified enough."

"Thanks: scarcely. I prefer to retain some vestiges of self-respect.
That will do for the youths on the beneficiary list, who are taken in
and done for from infancy, to whom it is an object to get a free
education and into a gentlemanly profession. That's the kind they mostly
make parsons of now, I hear. My boy, to do anything really in that line,
a man ought to have notions different from mine--rather. Why don't you
advise me to set up a kindergarten? That would suit as well as
chronicling ecclesiastical small beer. Cudgel your brains, and start
something more plau