nket of
new-fallen snow; the young trees which had been planted in avenues along
the lawns, but which were as yet hardly more than shrubs, glittered with
icicles, and above them rose the classic columns of the colonnaded
dormitories and professors' houses; while at one end of the oblong
square the majestic dome and columns of the Rotunda stood out against
the sky. As the entranced Dreamer gazed and gazed, trying to imagine
what it must be like by moonlight--what it would be in spring--what (a
few years later, when the trees should have grown large enough to arch
the walks) in summer--he told himself that surely in this garden-spot of
the Old Dominion, bricks and mortar had sprung into immortal bloom, and
he found himself quoting a line of his own:

"The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

Upon his earliest opportunity he sat down and wrote Myra a rhapsody upon
it all. Her presence, he felt, and he wrote her, was all needed to make
the place a paradise.

Under his name upon the matriculation book he had written, with
confidence:

"Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages." In the school of Ancient
Languages were taught (according to the announcement for the year)
"Hebrew, rhetoric, belles-lettres ancient history and geography;" in the
school of Modern Languages, "French, Spanish, Italian, German, and the
English language in its Anglo Saxon form; also modern history and modern
geography." A list, one would think, to daunt the courage of a seventeen
year old student and make him feel that he had the world on his
shoulders.

It was quite the contrary with The Dreamer. He felt instead that he had
suddenly developed wings. Learning came easy to him. He was already a
good French and Latin scholar, and the rest did not frighten him. Not
only was he not in the least burdened by thought of the work he was
cutting out for himself, but he was elated by a sense of freedom such as
he had never known before. Always before, both at home and at school, he
had been under surveillance. But now he was to be a partaker of the
benefits of Mr. Jefferson's theories of the treatment of students as men
and gentlemen--letting their conduct be a matter of _noblesse oblige_.

In the youth of seventeen this sudden withdrawal of oversight and
regulation produced an exhilaration that was indeed pleasurable. Among
the unfrequented hills known as the "Ragged Mountains," not far away,
was a wild and romantic region that inv