his unflagging patience, and kept him steadily
engaged with patterns and designs for embroidery,
leather flowers, and other dainty knickknacks.
And in return for all his exertions
they called him "sweet" and "beautiful," and
applied to him many other enthusiastic adjectives
seldom heard in connection with masculine
names. In the university, talents of this order
gained but slight recognition, and when Halfdan
had for three years been preparing himself
in vain for the examen philosophicum, he found
himself slowly and imperceptibly drifting into
the ranks of the so-called studiosi perpetui, who
preserve a solemn silence at the examination
tables, fraternize with every new generation of
freshmen, and at last become part of the fixed
furniture of their Alma Mater. In the larger
American colleges, such men are mercilessly
dropped or sent to a Divinity School; but the
European universities, whose tempers the centuries
have mellowed, harbor in their spacious
Gothic bosoms a tenderer heart for their
unfortunate sons. There the professors greet them
at the green tables with a good-humored smile
of recognition; they are treated with gentle
forbearance, and are allowed to linger on, until
they die or become tutors in the families of
remote clergymen, where they invariably fall
in love with the handsomest daughter, and thus
lounge into a modest prosperity.