so far behind at college--he had of course decided me on
his own university--and one of my contentments at this period was the
hope of winning ahead a year and leaving only two between us. This
would enable me to enter Yale when he was but half way in his course,
which as a matter of fact, I accomplished, to my mother's great pride.
She liked Roger, but always found him a little heavy and slow, and
secretly cherished my greater facility and more rapid mental
development with a fond and wholly female short-sightedness.

Our correspondence was very characteristic at this time: I have
specimens of both sides of it. My letters are long and detailed,
almost school-diaries. Roger's are few, short and immensely
impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that
strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great
events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy,
vital talk--and all in few, short words.

"We have been rolling hard for three days now," he says in one letter,
"and the ship's dog died of colic, which is about the worst sign there
is, they say. It may be we shall be wrecked. I wish you were here,
Jerry, you would enjoy it. They have stopped trying to coddle me now
and I live rough, like the rest. The food is not so very good, but we
all eat hard. I hardly ever cough at all now. The captain says I am as
handy as the next man."

The oldest of four, he had been looked up to and respected from the
nursery. A powerful influence at school, a prince regent at home,
wealthy in his own right, he stood in some danger of being spoiled, I
suppose. But the bluff skipper cousin, representative of that strange
New England _Wanderlust_, so little exploited in the anemic fiction
that so ridiculously caricatures New England life, stamped Roger at
this most impressionable age with the clean, downright simplicity, the
manly humility so signally characteristic of men who must always be
ready to perish in the elements; the ability to hold his tongue and
wait. Few families really rooted in that Old England that made the New
but can count in some generation their skipper cousin; in these the
whitecaps, the tall masts, the spices and hot nights, the scarlet
tropics and the dusky, startled natives tip with flame the quiet
chronicles of the sisters left at home; and gorgeous peacock fans,
rosy, enamelled shells, strings of sandalwood beads, riotous, bloomy
embroideries and supple fol