Now, any one who looks carefully at the picture of the old Holmes house, in Morse's biography of the Doctor, will perceive that this was not the style of roof which the house had,--at least, in its later years. Doctor Holmes graduated at Harvard in 1829 at the age of twenty. His class has been a celebrated one in Boston, and there were certainly some good men in it,--especially Benjamin Pierce and James Freeman Clarke,-- but I think it was Doctor Holmes's class-poems that gave it its chief celebrity, which, after all, means that it was a good deal talked about. In one of these he said: "No wonder the tutor can't sleep in his bed With two twenty-niners over his head." He was said to have composed twenty-nine poems for his class, and then declared that he had reached the proper limit,--that it would not be prudent to go beyond the magical number. It was not a dissipated class, but one with a good deal of life in it, much given to late hours and jokes, practical and unpractical. The Doctor himself is mysteriously silent concerning his college course, and so are his biographers; but we may surmise that it was not very different in general tenor from Lowell's; although his Yankee shrewdness would seem to have preserved him from serious catastrophes. In the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" Doctor Holmes mentions an early acquaintance with Margaret Fuller, which is not referred to by Mr. Morse, but must have arisen either at Mrs. Prentiss's Boston school or at the Cambridgeport school which young Oliver afterwards attended. Even at that age he recognized Margaret's intellectual gifts, and he was not a little emulous of her; for he fancied that he "had also drawn a small prize in the great literary lottery." He looked into one of her compositions, which was lying on the teacher's desk, and felt quite crest-fallen by discovering a word in it which he did not know the meaning of. This word was _trite_; and it may he suspected that a good many use it without being aware of its proper significance.