T

I

HE New England Express had given way to the Transcontinental Tourist, then I had taken my slate-colored telescope bag into the stuffy interior of a local, and this train had carried me into the heart of the gas zone, where the pungent, hissing fumes flavored the autumn air. I found myself finally standing on a splintered, smoked station platform where a town loafer drowsed on a baggage truck. At last I had reached the village wherein stood the ninety-dollar-ayear university-Evangelical University.

Between the university and the depot I passed neglected fields with clay banks starting up from them. Latticed oil derricks, connected to long shaftings by creaking wooden drivers which worked the pumps, dotted the fields. These oil-fields were separated from the deep-rutted road by moldy root fences whose black projections upheld lines of sputtering, leaking gas-pipe. A bluejeaned engineer, dripping with black oil, lay sprawled near a gas engine which missed a gasp now and then while it barked like the demon dog Cerberus.

I had never seen a college in my life. I had seen pictures of the leading universities of the world: Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.

I had read much of the literature, such as "Tom Brown," which has for its background armorial gateways, ivy-clothed turrets, tiny mullioned windows peeping out of quaint corners, peaceful greensward with pebbled paths whereon pale scholars, wearing board caps and sober gowns, walk with bulky tomes of Latin open on their palms. Up that clay road, from the top of a grade, I looked upon my first college; upon my college! It brought to mind a group of mill

tenements with a big, square grammar school in the midst. The colony of houses and dormitories stood open to the glare of the sun; for there were no full-grown shade trees to be seen. The smaller houses were on stilts, and plainly showed that the first severe windstorm might twist them off their perches.

I turned from the main highway, and, over a neat board walk, I hurried along one of the university streets. The powerful sun had not sucked all the rain that had fallen in the roadway. A sea of clay broth waited for the first foot that chanced to slip from the walk. Directly ahead of me, squat and frail, like a temporary camp-meeting tabernacle, stood a dormitory with the following legend painted over its front:

CHIEF PUNGO
MEMORIAL HALL, 1889

BORN IN AFRICA

DIED HERE 1885

A student met me in front of the building. I said to him, tremblingly: "Excuse me, sir. I have come here to see if I can get an education. I saw its advertisement in a church paper; that it gives board, room, tuition, all for ninety dollars a year. I came out without writing. A friend told me about it. I came from the mill. I don't know much. I never got through the common school. I wonder if they'd take me in ?"

The student replied: "I guess so. You can't see the President until the morning, though. You'd better come in with me. I

might see you through.

might see you through. That's just what this place is for: to give a fellow who is handicapped a chance. Come with me."

He led me into the Memorial Hall, down a dark vestibule, and showed me into a very

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small room, which, he said, was No. 5. The double bed had two depressions, plainly visible, where the previous occupants had maintained their respective rights. The bedquilt had a lurid Chinese puzzle design, which Jim, my new friend, explained was good to look at when your eyes got tired with study it rested the eyes! The outer edge of the bed left a right-angled alley which passed the window. In this alley were two kitchen tables covered with black oilcloth. One had nothing on it but a grayish layer of dust. The other had a row of books propped on it, and I saw an illustrated Bible open which had purple and red ink marks in it where Jim was marking out texts to use when he became a preacher of the Gospel. I saw only two chairs. One was a bare, gaunt kitchen chair; the kind one buys at country auctions for ten cents with a year's issue of the" Plain Farmer" thrown in. The other, though, was stuffed to an enormous thickness and upholstered in a faded bed comforter, torn in places, with patches of cotton stuffing bursting forth.

Farther down the alley, snug against the wall, stood a galvanized bucket with grease and fluff on it. "That ain't drinking water, is it?" I asked, in alarm. “No,” replied my host; "that's for fire. The drinking water's in here." He lifted up a large pitcher from the wash-bowl, and I saw that its lip was coated with a thin layer of black dirt, to which Jim must have become accustomed, or at least, if he knew of its presence, he must have argued, "Well, the water slips down over it; there ain't any danger from germs." In the corner I saw a gas stove. While I stood, taking off my coat in order to accept Jim's invitation to "wash up," a gust of wind came into the room, got its fingers under a slit in the lotus-patterned wall-paper, and with savage ease tore so much off and left it unfurled that fully one-third of the wall lay bare to the plaster. Jim, with philosophic calm, however, picked up a flat-iron, took some tacks, and fastened the paper back, remarking, "It came off the ceiling last week, too."

Standing before the washstand, I had to prod from the soap-dish two thin wafers of soap-one, a transparent prophecy of a full cake of the scented toilet sort; the other, yellow and odorous with naphtha, which I recognized as a powerful disinfecting and wash-day soap with which my aunt drove out black grease from mill overalls. By rubbing these two together in my palms I suc

ceeded in getting enough lather for my purpose, though I had to work fast, for the flowered wash-bowl had a yellow crack on its under side, through which the water trickled in a stream. "If you stay," said Jim, "they'll put you to room here. This is the only place that is left, just now.”

Then I told Jim that I would have to do something in order to live. "I've only got three dollars to my name," I confessed. He promised to look up Brock," a mystery which I did not understand till an hour later, when a tall, mustached German of middle age came into the room, called me " Brother Priddy," told me that he was a student, that he was also the head waiter in the dininghall, and that he would give me a chance that very night to try my hand at serving tables.

The dining-hall was a long, low building, with a great number of windows down its sides. The interior was very cheerful, with the long tables, the sparkle of plated silver, and the white-coated waiters hurrying about. Brock gave me, out of his own store, such a jacket and a long white apron. He indicated two tables at the entrance, and told me that they would be mine if I "managed." Then at last somewhere outside a high-pitched bell rang, there came a murmur from the campus, the double doors were opened, and in rushed the young men and women for their supper. I was in a panic, for I had never been in such exalted company as students before. What should I say to them? How should I act? They gathered around the tables, standing behind their chairs, evidently unaware of my existence until I went around among the twenty at my two tables and asked them what they would have cold water, warm water, or tea? I received eighteen orders for hot water and tea, went to the upper end of the room, where Brock stood alert with his finger pressed on the button of a Sunday-school bell, and, with thick hotel cups on a tray the size of a card-table, I managed to obtain my eighteen orders from the steaming urns. On my return the diners were busy singing a hymn. I had to force my way down the crowded aisles. When I reached my own tables to serve the drinks, while the last verse of the hymn was being sung, one of the students inadvertently stepped back, bumped into my tray, and down on skirts and trousers fell the eighteen cups of hot water and tea!

That night Jim left me alone while he went

down to one of the village churches. When he returned, he said that he was very sleepy, so he prepared for bed. He knelt at the bedside for his prayers, and stayed there until I had completed four chapters in a book of travel. I gazed upon that silent, meditative, kneeling figure before me with awed respect. What a fine type of Christian he must be ! how devout!-when all this was torn to pieces by a long, in-drawn snore. Jim had fallen asleep; that was all. I woke him up, only to be told that he had a habit of doing that. Would I always be so kind as to awaken him?

After chapel the next morning I was greeted by the President of the ninety-dollara-year university. The evening previous Jim had told me exciting things about this man. It turned out that he could read two pages of a book at a time, and that by merely glancing at a page he could pass an examination on its contents. With that uppermost in my mind, I entered the outer office, waited my turn, and was soon in the presence of the person upon whom so much depended.

His mouth twitched; twitched all the time. His eyes shone like polished coals deep under. his brows. It was a race between his mouth and his eyes; the mouth went in and out, lip under and over lip, while those two eyes snapped back and forth with electric suddenness. His features had the pallor, the gauntness, of death. A world of woe, of hunger, of intellectual dissipation, could be read plainly in him. He tried to smile a welcome when he saw me; but it seemed so unusual a thing for those ascetic signs to be disturbed by a smile that the whole attempt proved a failure. Even his voice sounded tired when he spoke. It had neither vibration nor health in it. In that presence I felt chilled, uninspired, and a strong desire to be away from it took hold of me.

But after a little chat I found that the President understood me perfectly. I heard him encouraging me, planning work for me, advising me, heartening me, when I urged my lack of mental discipline.

"We haven't any luxuries here," he said. "We have no endowments. The university is supported on sheer faith. I have to go out and persuade people to give small sums. The school is needed. It is, first of all, a Christian university. It takes in men and women who have neither the money nor the time to attend other expensive institutions. It gives the man or boy who needs a chance

You must stay

a start in intellectual things. with us. I want you to work hard, pay attention to your studies, earn money in your spare time, and make a useful man when you leave us. It is plain living and high thinking with us. Keep your three dollars; you will need it. We will defer your tuition until you can pay it more conveniently, at the end of the term. We will now make out your list of studies."

And fifteen minutes later, after the President had appraised my intellectual attainments, I went from the office with a yellow card on which was written a list of subjects that would have shocked the deanish exactitude of the dean of a four-hundred-dollar-ayear university. The list read: Grammar, Church history, beginning arithmetic, logic, beginning Latin, typewriting, and zoology.

II

The raison d'être of the ninety-dollar-ayear university I found in the Borden family. They lived in one of those three-roomed cottages which rested on stilts on the fringe of a sugar-cane field. Julius Borden, stout and towering, father of the family and forty years of age, sat with his son Jack, a lad of twelve, in the grammar and arithmetic classes. On account of his age and constantly paraded wisdom we called him "Pa." The mother had previously graduated from a high school, so, besides doing the housework and earning a snug sum of money from chickens, she took studies leading to the A.B. degree. Edith, the daughter, was following close after her mother in the College Preparatory Department. Had there been an infant of school age in the family, he could have adventured out of the simplicities of the A B and C's into the intricacies of his Ph.D., and, because of the coeducational facilities, he might have married and settled down as a professor, without moving from the spot.

In that memorial dormitory which rocked in every gale of wind dwelt many students with dark passages in their lives. To many of them Evangelical University was a refuge from a life of tragedy. John Elmer, in No. 12, had roamed through the world during the most of his thirty-three years, first as a runaway lad, then as a tramp; after that he had been a medicine faker and a quack doctor. He had scarred his soul with moral wrongs which had sent his parents and a sweetheart to untimely graves.

Now

I found him in the university making up for