You think back upon your respect for the
lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even
the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when
compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present
position.
It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about
you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already. Your chum, a
hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his
tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor. You
watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with
a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.
It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the
alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that
cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter. Yet with what a dreamy
horror you wake on mornings of snow to that tinkling alarum!--and glide
in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls,
shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the
buildings,--and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in
a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary
chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of
a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish,
your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he
steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the
cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs
through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.
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