elt some pride in keeping
up with them, and had enjoyed the advantage in Jamaica of the society of
an Oxford graduate who was coaching the two sons of a wealthy planter to
fit them to enter an English university. I read with him, and was well
able to pass my examination.

What it was for me to resume my old familiar intercourse with Holt and
Dart I could never write down here. My two years in the tropics had not
been joyless--indeed, considering all things, they had been singularly
happy years--still, I had felt like a child shut out from the sunshiny
place where his mates are playing. I had become patient, contemplative
and resigned, and in study and in studious observation of Nature in her
rarest beauty and most mighty and invincible development I had almost
forgotten the deliciousness of a selfish and individual hope, the
pleasures of happy and careless youth.

But as soon as I entered college I became sufficiently absorbed in the
actual. Neither Holt nor Dart had changed in the slightest degree,
except that Jack wore trim English whiskers and looked quite
middle-aged, and Harry was engaged in nursing the incipient down of a
moustache, and was the tallest, handsomest, cleverest fellow in his
class. Jack had always been the closest of students, and his old
diligence had not abated here: he kept up with the rest by dint of solid
hard work. Harry flung scholarship to the winds of course, but made a
special career for himself which won him more admiration from everybody
except the faculty than any amount of legitimate industry. He was a
fluent and ready debater; he wrote for the college journal; his high
animal spirits brought everybody about him, and his mind seemed ever
eager and poised for flight: he was ready in wit; decried trifling
subjects, yet would dispute for two hours over an absurdity; was
dexterous and unanswerable in his syllogisms; would advance the crudest
and most untenable theory, defend it, reducing the arguments of his
opponents to meaningless folly, conquer apparently by both wit and
reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it
into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short,
among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own
cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries
such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits
with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his
t