"I appreciate the arguments in favor of locating institutions of learning on the great lines of travel, and in or near large towns. It should be easy to get to them, and get away from them. The frequent mail and the time-destroying telegraph are now indispensable where students are a small minority of the population, and where there is a vigilant and effective police many disorders are prevented, and faculties and boards of trust are saved much trouble. Low vice is cheap, and will go to the most secluded spot in search of victims; but the city presents many refined pleasures which may serve to draw off ingenuous youth from haunts of sin and projects of mischief. But there are advantages on the side of the more quiet and retired situation. It favors concentration of interest on books, lectures, and light collegiate exercises. The whole life at the country college becomes student life. There is no division of mind and heart. There is nothing to tempt the earnest youth from his proper work. The _esprit du corps_ of old Randolph-Macon was very strong. There were hospitable and cultivated homes in the neighborhood, and most charming maidens; those who visited them found entangling alliances for life, if the fair sex consented. But the number of young ladies sufficiently near to be easily visited was small, and many of the students were not, if I must use the modern slang which was unknown in my day, calicoists. The two literary societies were centres of enthusiasm. A new Randolph-Macon student can hardly understand the intensity of devotion "Washs" and "Franks" had for their societies in those times. All students were members of the one or of the other, and were ready to brag for it, quarrel for it, and, if need be, fight for it. They did not all attend regularly the meetings, or take part in discussion and other literary exercises; their lack of presence or performance was amply atoned for by the payment of their fines, for we were always eager to replenish the treasury. But a number studied carefully the questions of debate, reading largely, and thus, forming a fondness for books and habit of reflection; they prepared their speeches, and often waxed very warm. Indeed, bitterness and strife would sometimes arise, but they soon passed away. A frequent and effective debater of rather waspish and contemptuous temper alluded one day to the arguments of his opponents as flimsy cobwebs, as he quoted one after another, and answered it, 'I brush that cobweb away,' said he. A modest, merry-hearted man on the other side--he is now one of Lee's one-armed heroes--responded: 'The gentleman called my arguments cobwebs, and it may be that they are; but to-day is not the first time that I have seen a fly caught in a spider's web, and vainly struggling to get loose.' Colonel R., an intelligent gentleman of the community, said to me more than once, when he had been listening to a spirited debate, 'It is not