and Connecticut, I suppose, is capable of producing any
unholy human phenomenon." Speaking of a beautiful and well mannered
Greek girl whom he had met, he says: "The little creature might be taken
for a Southern girl, but never for a Yankee. She has an easy manner and
even an air of gentility about her that doesn't appear north of Mason
and Dixon's Line. Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say race
intentionally: Yankeedom is the home of another race from us) however
much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon blood, it owes
its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate and culture. Who
says that we are not an improvement on the English? An improvement in a
happy combination of mental graces and Saxon force?" This sort of thing
is especially entertaining in the youthful Page, for it is precisely
against this kind of complacency that, as a mature man, he directed his
choicest ridicule. As an editor and writer his energies were devoted to
reconciling North and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do
with opening his eyes. Its young men and its professors were gathered
from all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned
more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung
nation known as the United States.

And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum. He
writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School, not,
however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve his
colloquial German. "Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?" he asks.
And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence--from
which these quotations are taken--with a young woman in North Carolina,
his cousin. About this time this cousin began spending her summers in
the Page home at Cary; her great interest in books made the two young
people good friends and companions. It was she who first introduced Page
to certain Southern writers, especially Timrod and Sidney Lanier, and,
when Page left for Johns Hopkins, the two entered into a compact for a
systematic reading and study of the English poets. According to this
plan, certain parts of Tennyson or Chaucer would be set aside for a
particular week's reading; then both would write the impressions gained
and the criticisms which they assumed to make, and send the product to
the other. The plan was carried out more faithfully than is usually the
case in such arrangements; a large number of Pa