ne down town to
the little packed and crowded book-store and bought the needful
student's supplies--so making the first draught on his money; been
assigned to a poor room in the austere dormitory behind the college;
made his first failures in recitations, standing before his professor
with no more articulate voice and no more courage than a sheep; and had
awakened to a new sense--the brotherhood of young souls about him, the
men of his college.

A revelation they were! Nearly all poor like himself; nearly all having
worked their way to the university: some from farms, some by teaching
distant country or mountain schools; some by the peddling of books--out
of unknown byways, from the hedges and ditches of life, they had
assembled: Calvary's regulars.

One scene in his new life struck upon the lad's imagination like a
vision out of the New Testament,--his first supper in the bare dining
room of that dormitory: the single long, rough table; the coarse,
frugal food; the shadows of the evening hour; at every chair a form
reverently standing; the saying of the brief grace--ah, that first
supper with the disciples!

Among the things he had to describe in his letter to his father and
mother, this scene came last; and his final words to them were a
blessing that they had made him one of this company of young men.

VI

The lad could not study eternally. The change from a toiling body and
idle mind to an idle body and toiling mind requires time to make the
latter condition unirksome. Happily there was small need to delve at
learning. His brain was like that of a healthy wild animal freshly
captured from nature. And as such an animal learns to snap at flung
bits of food, springing to meet them and sinking back on his haunches
keen-eyed for more; so mentally he caught at the lessons prepared for
him by his professors: every faculty asked only to be fed--and remained
hungry after the feeding.

Of afternoons, therefore, when recitations were over and his muscles
ached for exercise, he donned his old farm hat and went, stepping in
his high, awkward, investigating way around the town--unaware of
himself, unaware of the light-minded who often turned to smile at that
great gawk in grotesque garments, with his face full of beatitudes and
his pockets full of apples. For apples were beginning to come in from
the frosty orchards; and the fruit dealers along the streets piled them
into pyramids of temptation. It seemed a hardsh