As the night wanes, you wander for a last look toward the dingy walls
that have made for you so long a home. The old broken expectancies, the
days of glee, the triumphs, the rivalries, the defeats, the friendships,
are recalled with a fluttering of the heart that pride cannot wholly
subdue. You step upon the chapel-porch in the quiet of the night as you
would step on the graves of friends. You pace back and forth in the wan
moonlight, dreaming of that dim life which opens wide and long from the
morrow. The width and length oppress you: they crush down your
struggling self-consciousness like Titans dealing with Pygmies. A single
piercing thought of the vast and shadowy future, which is so near, tears
off on the instant all the gewgaws of pride, strips away the vanity that
doubles your bigness, and forces you down to the bare nakedness of what
you truly _are_!
With one more yearning look at the gray hulks of building, you loiter
away under the trees. The monster elms, which have bowered your proud
steps through four years of proudest life, lift up to the night their
rounded canopy of leaves with a quiet majesty that mocks you. They kiss
the same calm sky which they wooed four years ago; and they droop their
trailing limbs lovingly to the same earth, which has steadily and
quietly wrought in them their stature and their strength.
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