Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a
scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster: he is so
very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule. There
is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye,
whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher,
and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of
it. Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it
seems wonderfully odd that a man old enough to have children should
recite Xenophon by morning candle-light!
The class in advance you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the
precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about
your own age. The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their
aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings
to the time when you too shall be admitted freely to the precincts of
the Philosophical chamber, and to the very steep benches of the
Laboratory. This last seems, from occasional peeps through the blinds, a
most mysterious building. The chimneys, recesses, vats, and cisterns--to
say nothing of certain galvanic communications, which, you are told,
traverse the whole building in a way capable of killing a rat at an
incredible remove from the bland professor--utterly fatigue your
wonder! You humbly trust--though you have doubts upon the point--that
you will have the capacity to grasp it all, when once you shall have
arrived at the dignity of a Junior.
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