Young Bayard trod the icy path to his own particular hall (Galilee was its name) with the chronic homesickness of a city-bred man forced through a New England country winter under circumstances which forbade him to find fault with it. His profession and his seminary were his own choice; he had never been conscious of wavering in it, or caught in grumbling about it, but sometimes he felt that if he had been brought up differently,--like Tompkinton, for instance, not to say Holt,--he should have expended less of that vitality necessary to any kind of success in the simple process of enduring the unfamiliar. “How was the gale round your room last night?” inquired young Fenton, as the two climbed the frozen terraces, and leaped over the chains that hung between rows of stunted posts set at regular intervals in front of the Seminary buildings. For what purpose these stone dwarfs staggered there, no one but the founders of the institution knew; and they had been in their graves too long to tell. “It made me think of my uncle’s house,” observed Bayard. “By force of contrast? Yes. I never lived in Beacon Street. But I can guess. I pity you in that northwest corner. My mother sent me a soapstone by express last week. I should have been dead, I should have been frozen stark, without it. You heat it, you know, on top of the base-burner, and tuck it in the sheets. Then you forget and kick it out when you’re asleep, and it thumps on the fellow’s head in the room below, and he blackguards you for it through the ceiling. Better get one.” “Are you really _comfortable_--all night?” asked Bayard wistfully. “I haven’t thought about being warm or any of those luxuries since I came here. I expected to rough it. I mean to toughen myself.” In his heart he was repeating certain old words which ran like this: Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. But they did not come to his lips. He was as afraid of cant as too many young theologues are of sincere simplicity. “Oh, come, Bayard!” urged the other. “There’s where you miss it. Why not be comfortable? I don’t see that Christianity and misery need be identical. You are certain to have a tough time if you go on as you begin. Talk about election, foreordination, predestination! You take the whole set of condemnatory doctrines into your hands and settle your own fate beforehand. A man doesn’t leave Providence any free will who sets out in life as you do.” “Do I strike you that way?” asked the young man anxiously. “If there is anything I abhor, it is a gloomy clergyman!” “There you are again! Now I’m not finding fault with you,” began Fenton, settling his chin in his comfortable way. “Your soul is all nerves, man. It is a ganglion. You need more tissue round it--like me.”