no special meaning; but it immediately called up an image of a cross-eyed
man standing at the river's edge at Vevay, Indiana. This fellow was the
picture of ignorance and want. He was telling another man about catching a
big fish a few days before and how he liked that kind of fish boiled so
well, but he could not wait for it to boil, but had fried part of it and
eaten it that way. As I heard him relate this and watched his face, the
whole event seemed to me to be most disgusting. As I was watching him, some
one at my side told me that, because of a drunken spree, he had been
disfranchised. He was also a fisherman and another typical specimen of the
class. Mr. N., having the same facial defect, though in a much less
noticeable way, became identified with him, and I am again found walking
down the hill to oblivion in company with this brother in distress. This is
bad for Mr. N., but it cannot be helped.

The rainbows seem bright enough, but they bring in another disquieting group
of associations. The rainbow is almost, if not quite, a universal symbol of
failure. We all know the old story of going to the end of the rainbow for a
pot of gold, and if we want to belittle any effort we say that the
individual is chasing the rainbow. So here I am again on the downhill road
between two failures, following the rainbow to a hopeless condition of muddy
uselessness. And if it were not bad enough to be following one rainbow, I am
following a great number which must mean that I shall always end in failure
whatever I undertake.

But, besides this, the rainbow has special associations for me. The first of
these associations which came into consciousness was a little booklet made
by a Latin student and handed her professor. I had several years of Greek
and Latin under this teacher and at a certain place in the course, he asked
each student to make a little booklet of some kind, using as much
originality as possible, copy some favorite quotations from De Senectute and