smote them
right manfully. At other times the hostilities lagged, but they never
ceased entirely, and often they broke out suddenly with increased fury.
It was a mass and class war. To the butcher's son and the blacksmith's
boy and their like, the restless masses, I was indeed a bumptious
Malcolm. Conscious of the superior quality of the blood of the
McLaurins, and a little inflated with the pride of wealth, I had long
patronized them, so there was needed only my assumption of virtue to
fan the flames. But as I grew in years and knowledge, and the days of
my departure from the valley drew nearer, I relied less on my fists for
protection and more on a defensive armor of dignity. I became less a
target for missiles and more an object of jibes. These I met with
contempt, for I was going to college; I was going to McGraw University,
the alma mater of Mr. Pound, and this thought alone nerved me to step
out of the course of a flying stone with unconcern and to move down the
street with Pound-like mien.

There never was any discussion in our family as to where I should take
my collegiate training. Had there been, Mr. Pound would speedily have
quelled it. McGraw was the one college of which I knew anything. The
little that I could learn of others was through the sporting pages of
my father's Philadelphia paper, and here the name of Mr. Pound's alma
mater was strangely missing. But he drew a real picture of it for me;
gave me a concrete conception which I could not form from records of
touch-downs and runs and three-baggers to left field. Sometimes in the
study I would rise to points of information on Harvard, Princeton, or
Yale, but I was promptly declared out of order. Mr. Pound admitted
that these universities were larger than McGraw, and acknowledged that
in some special lines of education they might be in advance of McGraw;
yet, withal, had he a son he would intrust him only to the care of
Doctor John Francis Todd. As an educator and builder of character
Doctor Todd had no equal in the country. Mr. Pound could prove this.
He pointed to his old friend Adam Silliman, who graduated at Princeton
and was to-day a struggling coal merchant in Pleasantville, and drank.
With him he contrasted Sylvester Bradley, who got his degree at McGraw
in exactly the same year, '73, and had been three times moderator of
the Pennsylvania Synod. Of such comparisons between McGraw men who had
succeeded and other university men who ha