It has very likely occurred to you, my reader, that I am playing the wanton in these sketches, and am breaking through all the canons of the writers in making You my hero.

It is even so; for my work is a story of those vague feelings, doubts, passions, which belong more or less to every man of us all; and therefore it is that I lay upon your shoulders the burden of these dreams. If this or that one never belonged to your experience, have patience for a while. I feel sure that others are coming which will lie like a truth upon your heart, and draw you unwittingly—perhaps tearfully even—into the belief that You are indeed my hero.

The scene now changes to the cloister of a college; not the gray, classic cloisters which lie along the banks of the Cam or the Isis,—huge, battered hulks, on whose weather-stained decks great captains of learning have fought away their lives,—nor yet the cavernous, quadrangular courts that sleep under the dingy walls of the Sorbonne.

The youth-dreams of Clarence begin under the roof of one of those long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New England.

The floor of the room is rough, and divided by wide seams. The study-table does not stand firmly without a few spare pennies to prop it into solid footing. The bookcase of stained fir-wood, suspended against the wall by cords, is meagrely stocked with a couple of Lexicons, a pair of Grammars, a Euclid, a Xenophon, a Homer, and a Livy. Beside these are scattered about here and there a thumb-worn copy of British ballads, an odd volume of the "Sketch-Book," a clumsy Shakspeare, and a pocket edition of the Bible.

With such appliances, added to the half-score of professors and tutors who preside over the awful precincts, you are to work your way up to that proud entrance upon our American life which begins with the Baccalaureate degree. There is a tingling sensation in first walking under the shadow of those walls, uncouth as they are, and in feeling that you belong to them,—that you are a member, as it were, of the body-corporate, subject to an actual code of printed laws, and to actual moneyed fines varying from a shilling to fifty cents!

There is something exhilarating in the very consciousness of your subject state, and in the necessity of measuring your hours by the habit of such a learned community. You think back upon your respect for the lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present position.

It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already. Your chum, a hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor. You watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.

It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter. Yet with what a dreamy horror you wake on mornings of snow to that tinkling alarum!—and glide in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls, shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the buildings,—and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.

Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong smell of burnt feathers and oil. A jaunty tutor with pug nose and consequential air steps into the room—while you all rise to show him deference—and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk. Then come the formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,—the opening of his sweaty Xenophon to where the day's parasangs begin,—the unsliding of his silver pencil-case,—the keen, sour look around the benches, and the cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!

How you listen for each as it is uttered,—running down the page in advance,—rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the corner; and what a sigh of relief—on mornings after you have been out late at night—when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn, and—you, safe!

You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you. You wonder what sort of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes. You think one man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more extraordinary nose. The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect sang-froid, completely charm you: you set him down in your own mind as a kind of Crichton. Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster: he is so very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule. There is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye, whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher, and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of it. Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it seems wonderfully odd that a man old enough to have children should recite Xenophon by morning candle-light!

The class in advance you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about your own age. The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings to the time when you too shall be admitted freely to the precincts of the Philosophical chamber, and to the very steep benches of the Laboratory. This last seems, from occasional peeps through the blinds, a most mysterious building. The chimneys, recesses, vats, and cisterns—to say nothing of certain galvanic communications, which, you are told, traverse the whole building in a way capable of killing a rat at an incredible remove from the bland professor—utterly fatigue your wonder! You humbly trust—though you have doubts upon the point—that you will have the capacity to grasp it all, when once you shall have arrived at the dignity of a Junior.

As for the Seniors, your admiration for them is entirely boundless. In one or two individual instances, it is true, it has been broken down by an unfortunate squabble with thick-set fellows in the Chapel aisle. A person who sits not far before you at prayers, and whose name you seek out very early, bears a strong resemblance to some portrait of Dr. Johnson; you have very much the same kind of respect for him that you feel for the great lexicographer, and do not for a moment doubt his capacity to compile a dictionary equal, if not superior, to Johnson's.

Another man with very bushy, black hair, and an easy look of importance, carries a large cane, and is represented to you as an astonishing scholar and speaker. You do not doubt it; his very air proclaims it. You think of him as presently—(say four or five years hence)—astounding the United States Senate with his eloquence. And when once you have heard him in debate, with that ineffable gesture of his, you absolutely languish in your admiration for him, and you describe his speaking to your country friends as very little inferior, if at all, to Mr. Burke's. Beside this one are some half dozen others, among whom the question of superiority is, you understand, strongly mooted. It puzzles you to think, what an avalanche of talent will fall upon the country at the graduation of those Seniors!

You will find however that the country bears such inundations of college talent with a remarkable degree of equanimity. It is quite wonderful how all the Burkes, and Scotts, and Peels, among college Seniors, do quietly disappear, as a man gets on in life.

As for any degree of fellowship with such giants, it is an honor hardly to be thought of. But you have a classmate—I will call him Dalton—who is very intimate with a dashing Senior; they room near each other outside the college. You quite envy Dalton, and you come to know him well. He says that you are not a "green-one,"—that you have "cut your eye-teeth"; in return for which complimentary opinions you entertain a strong friendship for Dalton.

He is a "fast" fellow, as the Senior calls him; and it is a proud thing to happen at their rooms occasionally, and to match yourself for an hour or two (with the windows darkened) against a Senior at "old sledge." It is quite "the thing," as Dalton says, to meet a Senior familiarly in the street. Sometimes you go, after Dalton has taught you "the ropes," to have a cosy sit-down over oysters and champagne,—to which the Senior lends himself with the pleasantest condescension in the world. You are not altogether used to hard drinking; but this you conceal—as most spirited young fellows do—by drinking a great deal. You have a dim recollection of certain circumstances—very unimportant, yet very vividly impressed on your mind—which occurred on one of these occasions.

The oysters were exceedingly fine, and the champagne exquisite. You have a recollection of something being said, toward the end of the first bottle, of Xenophon, and of the Senior's saying in his playful way, "Oh, d—n Xenophon!"

You remember Dalton laughed at this; and you laughed—for company. You remember that you thought, and Dalton thought, and the Senior thought, by a singular coincidence, that the second bottle of champagne was better even than the first. You have a dim remembrance of the Senior's saying very loudly, "Clarence—(calling you by your family name)—is no spooney;" and drinking a bumper with you in confirmation of the remark.

You remember that Dalton broke out into a song, and that for a time you joined in the chorus; you think the Senior called you to order for repeating the chorus in the wrong place. You think the lights burned with remarkable brilliancy; and you remember that a remark of yours to that effect met with very much such a response from the Senior as he had before employed with reference to Xenophon.

You have a confused idea of calling Dalton—Xenophon. You think the meeting broke up with a chorus, and that somebody—you cannot tell who—broke two or three glasses. You remember questioning yourself very seriously as to whether you were, or were not, tipsy. You think you decided that you were not, but—might be.

You have a confused recollection of leaning upon some one, or something, going to your room; this sense of a desire to lean, you think, was very strong. You remember being horribly afflicted with the idea of having tried your night-key at the tutor's door, instead of your own; you remember further a hot stove,—made certain indeed by a large blister which appeared on your hand next day. You think of throwing off your clothes by one or two spasmodic efforts,—leaning in the intervals against the bedpost.

There is a recollection of an uncommon dizziness afterward, as if your body was very quiet, and your head gyrating with strange velocity, and a kind of centrifugal action, all about the room, and the college, and indeed the whole town. You think that you felt uncontrollable nausea after this, followed by positive sickness,—which waked your chum, who thought you very incoherent, and feared derangement.

A dismal state of lassitude follows, broken by the college-clock striking three, and by very rambling reflections upon champagne, Xenophon, "Captain Dick," Madge, and the old deacon who clinched his wig in the church.

The next morning (ah, how vexatious that all our follies are followed by a "next morning!") you wake with a parched mouth, and a torturing thirst; the sun is shining broadly into your reeking chamber. Prayers and recitations are long ago over; and you see through the door in the outer room that hard-faced chum with his Lexicon and Livy open before him, working out with all the earnestness of his iron purpose the steady steps toward preferment and success.

You go with some story of sudden sickness to the tutor,—half fearful that the bloodshot, swollen eyes will betray you. It is very mortifying too to meet Dalton appearing so gay and lively after it all, while you wear such an air of being "used up." You envy him thoroughly the extraordinary capacity that he has.

Here and there creeps in, amid all the pride and shame of the new life, a tender thought of the old home; but its joys are joys no longer: its highest aspirations even have resolved themselves into fine mist,—- like rainbows that the sun drinks with his beams.

The affection for a mother, whose kindness you recall with a suffused eye, is not gone, or blighted; but it is woven up, as only a single adorning tissue, into the growing pride of youth: it is cherished in the proud soul rather as a redeeming weakness than as a vital energy.

And the love for Nelly, though it bates no jot of fervor, is woven into the scale of growing purposes rather as a color to adorn than as a strand to strengthen.

As for your other loves, those romantic ones which were kindled by bright eyes, and the stolen reading of Miss Porter's novels, they linger on your mind like perfumes; and they float down your memory—with the figure, the step, the last words of those young girls who raised them—like the types of some dimly shadowed but deeper passion, which is some time to spur your maturer purposes and to quicken your manly resolves.

It would be hard to tell, for you do not as yet know, but that Madge herself—hoidenish, blue-eyed Madge—is to be the very one who will gain such hold upon your riper affections as she has held already over your boyish caprice. It is a part of the pride—I may say rather an evidence of the pride—which youth feels in leaving boyhood behind him, to talk laughingly and carelessly of those attachments which made his young years so balmy with dreams.