classic
orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and bare like Cicero's, and his
toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was carried on his arm, whatever
might have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid grace that he
might have been turned into marble as he stood, and looked noble by the
side of the antiques of the Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling his
throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once, speaking
of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles. Ill health
gives a certain common character to all faces, as Nature has a fixed
course which she follows in dismantling a human countenance: the noblest
and the fairest is but a death's-head decently covered over for the
transient ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls half off before
the procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to
be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy,
as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,--just as
old doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their
later days. He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so long
and so exhaustively, that he would have seemed more at home among the
mediaeval schoolmen than amidst the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the world
is waiting in dumb expectancy. In due time the world seizes upon these
wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves
of an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for the most part
heard of no more. We had two great men, grown up both of them. Which
was the more awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, we
debated. Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by taking one away
early, and padding the other with prosperity so that his course was
comparatively noiseless and ineffective. We had our societies, too; one
in particular, "The Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am
under a lifelong obligation never to reveal. The fate of William Morgan,
which the community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the
danger of the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study a
season of relief. One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of asking
stu