do not look into the mirror so often. We know what he has been
up to. As yet there is unfortunately no science of reading other
people's faces; I think a chair for this should be founded
in St. Andrews.

The new professor will need to be a sublime philosopher, and for
obvious reasons he ought to wear spectacles before his senior class.
It will be a gloriously optimistic chair, for he can tell his
students the glowing truth, that what their faces are to be like
presently depends mainly on themselves. Mainly, not altogether--

'I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.'

I found the other day an old letter from Henley that told me of the
circumstances in which he wrote that poem. 'I was a patient,'
he writes, 'in the old infirmary of Edinburgh. I had heard vaguely
of Lister, and went there as a sort of forlorn hope on the chance of
saving my foot. The great surgeon received me, as he did and does
everybody, with the greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay
in one or other ward of the old place under his care. It was a
desperate business, but he saved my foot, and here I am.' There he
was, ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing during that
'desperate business' was singing that he was master of his fate.

If you want an example of courage try Henley. Or Stevenson.
I could tell you some stories abut these two, but they would not
be dull enough for a rectorial address. For courage, again,
take Meredith, whose laugh was 'as broad as a thousand beeves at
pasture.' Take, as I think, the greatest figure literature has