the foot of the long hill and turned his face for the first time
towards St. George's Hall. As he passed up the shaded street along the
northern side of the campus, his keen, blue-grey eyes swept eagerly the
crest on which stood the institution that was destined to be the scene
of his professional labours for at least a year, perhaps for many
years, it might be, for life. Even a casual glance at the tall,
loosely hung figure of the young man, at his clean-cut features and
firm mouth, at the nervous, capable hand that grasped his walking-stick
as if it were a weapon, would reveal the type claimed by America as
peculiarly her own. It was evident that he possessed energy and
endurance, if not the power of the athlete. His expression was
intellectual, and shrewd almost to hardness; yet somewhere in his eyes
and in the corners of his mouth there lurked a suggestion of sweetness
and of ideality, that gave the whole personality a claim to more than
passing interest and regard.

This curious blending of opposite traits, of shrewdness and of
ideality, was illustrated by his thoughts as he strode along, making no
more of the hill than he would have made of level ground. Nothing
escaped his eye or failed of its impression upon his mind. Fresh from
the teeming life of a large university, he noted the absence of
students from the steps of the fraternity houses on his right, though
it lacked but three days of the opening of the college. Already his
own university had felt the first wave of the incoming class, a class
that would doubtless contain four times as many students as the total
membership of St. George's Hall. Instinctively he searched his mind
for an explanation of this lack of growth in an institution that
numbered nearly one hundred years of life. What was the defect? Where
was the remedy? He jumped at once to the conclusion that both were
discoverable, and dimly foresaw that the discovery might be his own.