Once he had been young. But that was in the day of hard work, when youth toiled to live. Then no lad was more sprightly than he. His early home was a long, low, rambling farmhouse in a southern state, where the flowers came early in the spring and bloomed and bloomed again late into autumn. There, to him, imaginative, dreaming, for all his boyish activity, the life out-of-doors was little less than participation in a splendid pageant--the Pageant of Summer. On the farm adjoining lived another boy and together they builded air-castles and procrastinated through the long, still evenings, when the work of the day was done. And of such sort were the castles that they lived in them, even as they worked afield, and sowed, and reaped, and sowed again. Of all their dreams one was fairer than the others. It was of a college in the north where boys might go, and, once there, might learn the finer things. One day they resolved to make their goal that college. They toiled longer each day, then, until the red sun slipped below the wood-line to the west, and when the summer died they fared forth together. Side by side they sat at lectures and at recitations. They lived together in a little room across the river where rooms were more cheaply to be had and where landladies were more accommodating and framed no loud objections to simple cooking on a smoky oil stove. Halcyon days those were to the lads, and the very experience of poverty whetted their appetites for the luxuries they dreamed one day would be for them. Together they had from the hands of the president their diplomas, squares of sheepskin all written over in stately Latin--the golden fleece of their heroic quest. He who later was to be the old professor, became the young professor then; and the friend of the four years in the little room across the river, where simple cooking was permitted, went away, nor ever came back again. So near had been their lives that for a time the young professor was sad. A portrait on tin was all he had to recall the face of him who was gone, and frequently, of a Sunday afternoon which was set apart for a walk afield, he would seat himself beside the river and with the little portrait on his knee indulge in retrospections of the by-gone days when they were lads together on adjoining farms. Such fragrant reveries constituted the leaven needed in the young professor's life, for in the University circle he was much sought. He was a brilliant man; his ideas were "advanced" then, original and new. His conversation at dinner was sprightly, vivacious. He had the gallantry of generations of Southern gentlemen and was beloved of all the ladies. He was wont on occasion to pass the compliment with an almost Italian grace and he rejoiced in the tap of the fan upon his wrist which was his feminine reward. "You must not fail us," a hostess would say, "you know Professor ---- will be here; such a brilliant man; such charming manners."