procession, headed by the tall figure of the Principal, imposed a
moment's silence, broken by outbursts of welcoming applause. The
Professors of Whitelaw College were highly popular, not alone with
the members of their classes, but with all the educated inhabitants
of Kingsmill; and deservedly, for several of them bore names of wide
recognition, and as a body they did honour to the institution which
had won their services. With becoming formality they seated
themselves in face of the public. On tables before them were exposed
a considerable number of well-bound books, shortly to be distributed
among the collegians, who gazed in that direction with speculative
eyes.

Among the general concourse might have been discovered two or three
representatives of the wage-earning multitude which Kingsmill
depended upon for its prosperity, but their presence was due to
exceptional circumstances; the College provided for proletarian
education by a system of evening classes, a curriculum necessarily
quite apart from that followed by the regular students. Kingsmill,
to be sure, was no nurse of Toryism; the robust employers of labour
who sent their sons to Whitelaw--either to complete a training
deemed sufficient for an active career, or by way of
transition-stage between school and university--were for the most
part avowed Radicals, in theory scornful of privilege, practically
supporters of that mode of freedom which regards life as a
remorseless conflict. Not a few of the young men (some of these the
hardest and most successful workers) came from poor, middle-class
homes, whence, but for Sir Job's foundation, they must have set
forth into the world with no better equipment of knowledge than was
supplied by some 'academy' of the old type: a glance distinguished
such students from the well-dressed and well-fed offspring of