a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but not in reality. Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the “chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town with a crowd of fellows--like those talkative groups he so often saw after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge car--stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good things,--conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly extricating others from a similar one.