In these time-honored institutions, young women have kept step with young men in the daily pursuit of science, not only without disorder or unseemly scandal, but with manifestly more quietness and refinement of manner than obtains in institutions where female association ceases altogether. The presence of a couple of dozen of well-bred ladies in the lecture and recitation rooms of a college would probably be a preventive of many of the unseemly and clumsy jokes wherewith it has been customary to diversify the paths of science, to the affliction of the souls of professors. But for us boys, there was no gospel of womanhood except what was to be got from the letters of mothers and sisters, and such imperfect and flitting acquaintance as we could pick up in the streets with the girls of the village. Now though there might be profit, could young men and women see each other daily under the responsibility of serious business, keeping step with one another in higher studies, yet it by no means follows that this kind of flitting glimpse-like acquaintance, formed merely in the exchange of a few outside superficialities, can have any particularly good effect. No element of true worthy friendship, of sober appreciation, or manly or womanly good sense, generally enters into these girl-and-boy flirtations, which are the only substitute for family association during the barren years of student life. The students were not often invited into families, and those who gained a character as ladies' men were not favorably looked upon by our elders. Now and then by rare and exceptional good luck a college student is made at home in some good family, where there is a nice kind mother and the wholesome atmosphere of human life; or, he forms the acquaintance of some woman, older and wiser than himself, who can talk with him on all the multitude of topics his college studies suggest. But such cases are only exceptions. In general there is no choice between flirtation and monastic isolation. For my part, I posed myself on the exemplary platform, and remembering my uncle Jacob's advice, contemplated life with the grim rigidity of a philosopher. I was going to have no trifling, and surveyed the girls at church, on Sunday, with a distant and severe air--as gay creatures of an hour, who could hold no place in my serious meditations. Plato or Aristotle, in person, could not have contemplated life and society from a more serene height of composure. I was favorably known by my teachers, and held rank at the head of my class, and was stigmatized as a "dig," by frisky young gentlemen who enjoyed rolling cannon balls down stairs--taking the tongue out of the chapel bell--greasing the seats, and other thread-bare college jokes, which they had not genius enough to vary, so as to give them a spice of originality.