"Now, Miss Blake, you'll come home with us. You'll not stop another minute at the hotel. No, I'll not hear a word. I won't take a refusal. Nobody has as good a right to you as I, your father's old friend, Ned Cartwright." Then he had grasped her warmly by the hand, exclaiming delightedly,--"My dear young lady! My dear young lady! It was your father over again, Harry Blake, Prince Hal we used to call him. And is that the way you girls feel about college? Bless me, I'd never have believed it. I have heard so much solemn nonsense talked about what you do and say and think. But I'll never believe it again. Why, you might have been talking about my own college days, and your father's too,--Prince Hal we used to call him. I'll never forget how we stole the clapper, he and I. And they do it still, my dear, just as we used to, and you steal your clappers too, and, bless me,--I'll send every girl I can to college, if that's the way you all feel about it. That's education! It isn't all books,--never was and never will be. Just ask your father and he'll tell you so too. Yes, I give you my word, every one of them shall go. I'll see to it. I'd as soon shut them off from fairy stories and Walter Scott, and falling in love, because they were girls. It's romance, that's what it is and they've a right to their romance; for I'm an old man, my dear, and perhaps you'll take my word for it, it's the romance of life that counts,--for the girls as well as the boys." While he was still talking Mrs. Cartwright had come up with a welcome as hearty as his. Their hospitality had been irresistible, and Ellen, powerless before it, was soon walking with them to the carriage. But just as she had been about to get in she had been stopped once more. "Pardon me, Miss Blake," some one had said, and there had stood the reporter with her manuscript. "I think there must be some mistake," he had gone on to say, "the paper you gave me deals with the practical value of college life and you talked this morning on what you called 'the Poetry of College Spirit.'"