ividuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the
prairie itself--far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops
in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch
with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see
the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of
sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting
along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear
to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the
advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.

To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car
of the M. & D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and
enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked
humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble
bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what
Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a
large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the
flesh, and he saw--it really was there, for him!--the "College Book
Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on
Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a
sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the
Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.

He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers
and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might
easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn.
Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily,
and inquired:

"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of
rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."

He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato
College.

He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the
widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week
for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large,
solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy,
slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered
as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat
studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He
remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of
Academ