and there was a small sliding-rack on the table, presumably for those
volumes he immediately required for his work. A rare copy of _Sextus
Empiricus_, with the Greek and Latin side by side, lay open on an
inclined desk at one end, and the table was strewn with papers, on which
were roughly drawn a variety of mathematical figures, margined all
around with odd-looking equations and algebraically-expressed formulæ.
Well-thumbed volumes of mathematical works in English, German, and
French, lay about, opened in various places, and there was a cracked old
plate, half full of tobacco ashes and the ends of cigarettes. The
remaining furniture of the room was simple and poor: a neat camp
bedstead, a boot-jack, and a round mirror, not more than four inches in
diameter; a tin tub and an iron washing-stand; a much battered old
"schläger," with the colours at the hilt all in rags, hung over the iron
stove; and that was all the room contained besides books and the
working-table and chair. It would be impossible to live more simply, and
yet everything was neat and clean, and stamped, too, with a certain
_cachet_ of individuality. There were probably hundreds of student-rooms
in the town of Heidelberg which boasted no more adornment or luxury than
this, and yet there was not one that looked like it. A student's room,
as he grows up, is a reflection of himself; it is a kind of dissolving
view, in which the one set of objects and books fades gradually away as
his opinions form themselves, and as he collects about him the works
that are really of interest to him, as distinguished from those with
which he has been obliged to occupy himself prior to taking his
academic steps. Then, as in the human frame every particle of bone and
sinew is said to change in seven years, the student one day looks about
him and recognises that hardly a book or a paper is there of all the
store over which he was busied in those months before he took his
degree, or sustained his disputation. When a man has entered on his
career, if he enters on it with a will, he soon finds that all books and