To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of Knox’s theology upon Knox’s own heath, a harvest of forty acres of wheat brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 × 50 × $0.50 = $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of September, before leaving for college, and cut the grain after commencement in June. The blue-green blades barely peeped through the glebe during winter. When springtime came, and the hot sun shone upon the steaming earth, and the spirit of growth crept into the roots, an invalid father--the young planter being still in academic cassock--kept the fences up and vagrant cows from mowing the crop under their sweet breath. Other men often told of like ways of earning not only college bread but also college skittles. Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting German lyrics or Plato’s idealism from a wheat-furrow. Report of such advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success, while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances and triumphant exit from such conditions. Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sévigné reports herself to have done--and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, “a vary parfit, gentil knight,” her face ruddy with healthy blood, her muscles firm and active--such a girl said one day, in extenuation of her lack of Greek composition, that “her duties had not permitted her to prepare it.” “But that is your duty, to prepare it,” I answered. “Are you one of those students who never allow studies to interfere with ‘business’?” “No,” she said, quickly; “but let me tell you how it happened. The boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the morning and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up here. In the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly dark. The evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies.” What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an Eastern college.