the Southern boy, with the strange notions about the North and Northern
people which were the inheritance of many years' misunderstandings. He
writes of one fellow student to whom he had taken a liking. "He is that
rare thing," he says, "a Yankee Christian gentleman." He particularly
dislikes one of his instructors, but, as he explains, he is "a native of
Connecticut, and Connecticut, I suppose, is capable of producing any
unholy human phenomenon." Speaking of a beautiful and well mannered
Greek girl whom he had met, he says: "The little creature might be taken
for a Southern girl, but never for a Yankee. She has an easy manner and
even an air of gentility about her that doesn't appear north of Mason
and Dixon's Line. Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say race
intentionally: Yankeedom is the home of another race from us) however
much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon blood, it owes
its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate and culture. Who
says that we are not an improvement on the English? An improvement in a
happy combination of mental graces and Saxon force?" This sort of thing
is especially entertaining in the youthful Page, for it is precisely
against this kind of complacency that, as a mature man, he directed his
choicest ridicule. As an editor and writer his energies were devoted to
reconciling North and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do
with opening his eyes. Its young men and its professors were gathered
from all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned
more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung
nation known as the United States.

And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum. He
writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School, not,
however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve his
colloquial German. "Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?" he asks.
And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence--from