ps a
few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist. "My sweet
poet!"

The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again,
as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.

She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in
the mouth....

"My sweet poet," she repeated, "good-bye!"

* * * * *

While at Mt. Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language. And it
was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a
text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of
Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.

And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in
Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education
was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big
concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be
less appallingly machine-like.

The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the
University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's
office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception
of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no
longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode
a freight further to Laurel.

* * * * *

In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards
at Laurel....

I enquired my way to the university.

"Up on the hill."

I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....

The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides
the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.

One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I
stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor
Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group
of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering
when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from
my long ride.

I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ig