ourse
at this modest little school, finding in it all the essential elements
of an education, for we caught at every chance quotation from the
scientists, every fleeting literary allusion in the magazines,
attaining, at last, a dim knowledge of what was going on in the great
outside world of letters and discovery. Of course there were elections
and tariff reforms and other comparatively unimportant matters taking
place in the state but they made only the most transient impression on
our minds.

During the last winter of our stay at the Seminary, my associate in
housekeeping was one Adelbert Jones, the son of a well-to-do farmer who
lived directly east of town. "Del," as we called him, always alluded to
himself as "Ferguson." He was tall, with a very large blond face
inclined to freckle and his first care of a morning was to scrutinize
himself most anxiously to see whether the troublesome brown flecks were
increasing or diminishing in number. Often upon reaching the open air he
would sniff the east wind and say lugubriously, "This is the kind of day
that brings out the freckles on your Uncle Ferg."

He was one of the best dressed men in the school, and especially finicky
about his collars and ties,--was, indeed, one of the earliest to
purchase linen. He also parted his yellow hair in the middle (which was
a very noticeable thing in those days) and was always talking of taking
a girl to a social or to prayer meeting. But, like Burton, he never
did. So far as I knew he never "went double," and most of the girls
looked upon him as more or less of a rustic, notwithstanding his fine
figure and careful dress.

As for me I did once hire a horse and carriage of a friend and took
Alice for a drive! More than thirty-five years have passed since that
adventure and yet I can see every turn in that road! I can hear the
crackle of my starched shirt and the creak of my suspender buckles as I
write.

Alice, being quite as bashful as myself, kept our conversation to the
high plane of Hawthorne and Poe and Schiller with an occasional tired
droop to the weather, hence I infer that she was as much relieved as I
when we reached her boarding house some two hours later. It was my first
and only attempt at this, the most common of all ways of entertaining
one's best girl.

The youth who furnished the carriage betrayed me, and the outcry of my
friends so intimidated me that I dared not look Alice in the face. My
only comfort was that no o