ble to live more simply, and
yet everything was neat and clean, and stamped, too, with a certain
_cachet_ of individuality. There were probably hundreds of student-rooms
in the town of Heidelberg which boasted no more adornment or luxury than
this, and yet there was not one that looked like it. A student's room,
as he grows up, is a reflection of himself; it is a kind of dissolving
view, in which the one set of objects and books fades gradually away as
his opinions form themselves, and as he collects about him the works
that are really of interest to him, as distinguished from those with
which he has been obliged to occupy himself prior to taking his
academic steps. Then, as in the human frame every particle of bone and
sinew is said to change in seven years, the student one day looks about
him and recognises that hardly a book or a paper is there of all the
store over which he was busied in those months before he took his
degree, or sustained his disputation. When a man has entered on his
career, if he enters on it with a will, he soon finds that all books and
objects not essential as tools for his work creep stealthily into the
dusty corner, or to the inaccessible top shelf of the bookcase,--or if
he is very poor, to the second-hand bookshop. He cannot afford to be
hampered by any dead weight.

Now Dr. Claudius had gone through many changes of thought and habit
since he came to Heidelberg ten years ago. But he had never changed his
quarters; for he loved the garret window and the isolation from visits
and companions that he gained by his three flights of stairs. The
camp-bed in the corner was the same whereon he had lain after his first
duel, with a bag of ice on his head and his bosom friend by his side,
with a long pipe. At that very table he had drawn his first caricature
of Herr Professor Winkelnase, which had been framed and hung up in the
"Kneipe"--the drinking-hall of his corps; at the same board he had
written his thesis for his doctorate, and here again he had penned the
notes for his first lecture. Professor Winkelnase was dead; not one of
his old corps-brothers remained in Heidelberg, but still he clung to the
old room. The learned doctors with whom he drank his wine or his beer of
an evening, when he sallied forth from his solitude, wondered at his way
of living; for Dr. Claudius was not poor, as incomes go in South
Germany. He had a modest competence of his own to begin with, and his
lectures brought him