to us." "We sit round with him," said another, "and he simply smokes
and goes over our exercises with us." From this and other evidence I
gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of
students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically
smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts
this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in
operation. A well-smoked man speaks, and writes English with a grace
that can be acquired in no other way.

In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism
against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of
doing so. For the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I
have nothing but a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest
difference between the modern up-to-date American idea of a professor
and the English type. But even with us in older days, in the bygone
time when such people as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were professors,
one found the English idea; a professor was supposed to be a
venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his
stomach. He was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the
world around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money
he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, as his trustees were
proud to say of him, "a child."

On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning
of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning
was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody.
Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind.

At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was
even whiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater,