staches,
"that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you
in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be
more--er, more congenial."

I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it
up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I
had the plague! I felt sorry for myself.

I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop
much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the
unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the
street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on
the corner and passed me an occasional lofty jest--and a thousand other
things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness.

The school was comfortable enough. It was a huge, barn-like affair,
built in the previous generation and hardly ever repainted since then,
to look at it. The towers at either end of it had tin and battered
battlements, and the flanks of steps which went up the hill on which it
stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds of boys who had marched
upon them, each succeeding year. It was so with the stairs all through
the building: each step had a shallow, smooth cup which years of
treading had ground out. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's
antiquity.

There was a large parade ground at the back of the building. Its grass
was brown and mealy, and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side,
jutted up from the center of it like a long, lone fin.

In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall,
stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning
leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged
by the British in Revolutionary days--but it may have been only a fable.
I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson
has its Revolutionary oak--but, at the time, it made a deep impression
on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches
against my dormitory window.

This dormitory, to which I and my belongings repaired, was a long,
narrow, whitewashed room, crowded with iron cots and intruding
wardrobes. At night, when the bugle had blown taps and the lights were
dimmed, there was a ghostly quality to the rows of white and huddled
figures that lay the length of the room. There was never absolute quiet.
Sometimes some little boy would be sobbi