“Has the Professor tea’d you yet, Bent?” asked Bayard, rousing, perhaps a little too obviously anxious to turn the channels of conversation. Genealogical problems at best, and in picked company, are unsafe topics; hence peculiarly dangerous at a club table of poor theologues, half of whom must, in the nature of things, be forcing their way into social conditions wholly unknown to their past. Bayard was quicker than the other men to think of such things. “Oh yes,” said Bent, with a slightly twitching mustache. “Ten of us at a time in alphabetical order. I came the first night, being a B. Madam his wife and Mademoiselle his daughter were present, the only ladies against such a lot of us. I pitied them. But Miss Carruth seemed to pity us. She showed me her photograph book, and some Swiss pickle forks--carved. Then she asked me if I read Comte. And then her mother asked me how many of the class had received calls. Then the Professor told some stories about a Baptist minister. And so by and by we came away. It was an abandoned hour--for Cesarea. It was ten o’clock.” “I was in town that night,” observed Bayard. “I had to send my regrets.” “If you were in town, why couldn’t you go?” asked the middler. “I mean that I was out of town. I was in Boston. I had gone home,” explained Bayard pleasantly. “You won’t come in now till after the Z’s,” suggested Fenton quickly; “or else you’ll be left over till the postgraduates take turn, and the B’s come on again.” The Baldwin apples were all eaten now, and the stone china was disappearing from the long table in detachments. Jaynes and the Special Course man had followed Tompkinton, and the middler and Bent now pushed back their chairs. Bayard remained a moment to ask after the landlady’s neuralgia,--he was one of the men who do not economize sympathy without more effort than its repression is usually worth,--and Fenton waited for him in the cold hall. The two young men shoved their shoulders into their overcoats sturdily, and walked across the Seminary green together to their rooms. Strictly speaking, one should say the Seminary “white.” It was midwinter, and on top of Cesarea Hill. From the four corners of the earth the winds of heaven blew, and beat against that spot; to it the first snowflake flew, and on it the last blizzard fell. Were the winters longer and the summers hotter in Cesarea than in other places? So thought the theologues in the old draughty, shaking Seminary dormitories dignified by time and native talent with the name of “halls.”