goes the
larger are the houses and the more imposing, suggesting a contest in
which the stronger have overtopped their weaker brethren. But the
university, I suspect, was never surfeited with practical sense, else
she would not have settled on the very crest of the hill, to shiver the
winter through in icy winds and in the summer to bake in tropic heat.
There was, indeed, a delightful lack of responsibility about the
university. She had something of Micawber's nature, and was so inured
to adversity that she would have been ill at ease in a position less
imposing, even though less exposed. She might shiver, but she would
dominate the town. She was hopefully waiting for something to turn up,
and for such a purpose was well placed, for the railroad threaded the
narrow valley below, and at any moment some multi-millionaire might see
her from the car window, take pity and endow her. This impression of
worth in honorable tatters, of virtue appealing for aid, is made on me
to-day when the train swings around the jutting hill and I behold the
roof of "Old Main" rising from the trees, and the smutted white dome of
the observatory. But that afternoon when I first saw my alma mater, I
was quite overwhelmed by her magnificence. Before that I had known
McGraw only by an ancient wood-cut of Mr. Pound's, which showed a long
building, supremely bare, set among military trees; with a barouche in
the foreground in which was a woman holding a parasol; with
wooden-looking gentlemen in beaver hats pointing canes at the windows
as though they were studying the beauties of imagined tracery. The
military trees had grown, and through the gaps in the foliage as I drew
nearer I made out the detail of the most imposing structure I had ever
seen. Not St. Peter's, nor the Colosseum, nor the Temple of the Sun
have awakened in me the same thrill of admiration that shot through my
veins when "Old Main" stretched its bare brick walls before me to
incomprehensible distances, and rising carried my eyes to the sky
itself, where the Gothic wood-work of the tower pierced it.

In the name, "Old Main," there is a suggestion of a score of collegiate
Gothic quadrangles clustering about their common mother, but these
existed only in the dreams of Doctor Todd, and the most tangible
expression they found was in a blue-print which was hung in a
conspicuous place in his study and presented his scheme of placing the
different schools in that hoped-for day whe