es on a lounge of the
marble-paved lobby and smoked cigarettes. This was liberty indeed! At
length we departed for Cambridge, in another herdic.

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 lo