mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by
myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell
boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched
himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and
slowed the flight of time--time that had crept so insidiously through the
lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.
Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus
in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate
consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls
and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.

The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire,
yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against
the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and
unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic
succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward
trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became
personal to him. The silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an
occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong
grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this perception.

"Damn it all," he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp and
running them through his hair. "Next year I work!" Yet he knew that
where now the spirit of spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent,
it would then overawe him. Where now he realized only his own
inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and
insufficiency.

The college dreamed on--awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might
have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was