fascinated him last. His note-book began at that time to show two
volumes a day on an average, and once or twice he stopped at night
to wonder how it had actually been possible for him to read poetry
fourteen hours a day for a whole week and not be tired.

He taught himself German, and that led to another great
discovery--he made the acquaintance of Goethe. The power of that
mighty spirit took hold of him, so that he prayed to him when he was
lonely, and kept the photograph of the young poet in his pocket, to
gaze at it as at a lover. The great eyes came to haunt him so that
one night he awoke crying out, because he had dreamed he was going
to meet Goethe.

In the catalog of the university there were listed a number of
courses in "rhetoric and English composition". They were for the
purpose of teaching one how to write, and the catalog set forth
convincingly the methods whereby this was done. Thyrsis wished to
know all there was to know about writing, and so ne enrolled himself
for an advanced course, and went for an hour every day and listened
to expositions of the elements of sentence-structure by Prof.
Osborne, author of "American Prose Writers" and "The Science of
Rhetoric". The professor would give him a theme, and bid him bring
in a five-hundred word composition. Perhaps it was that Thyrsis was
lacking in the play-spirit; at any rate he could not write
convincingly on the subject of "The Duty of the College Man to
Support Athletics." He struggled for a month against his own
impotence, and then went to see his instructor.

"I think," he said, "I shall have to drop Course A."