The daily bread question, or how to get a living,--the ambitious heavings, or the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, all to be got by some yielding to Satan,--the ostentatious impulse to come down on the world with a rush and a sensation,--these are mirrored in a young man's smaller life just as they were in that great life. The whole Heavens can be reflected in the little pool as in the broad ocean! All these elements of unrest had been boiling in my mind during the last year. Who wants to be nothing in the great world? No _young_ man at this time of his course. The wisdom of becoming nothing that he may possess all things is too high for this stage of immaturity. I came into college as simple, and contented, and satisfied, as a huckleberry bush in a sweet-fern pasture. I felt rich enough for all I wanted to do, and my path of life lay before me defined with great simplicity. But my intimacy with Miss Ellery, her marriage and all that pertained to it, had brought before my eyes the world of wealth and fashion, a world which a young collegian may try to despise, and about which he may write the most disparaging moral reflections, but which has, after all, its power to trouble his soul. The consciousness of being gloveless, and threadbare in toilet, comes over one in certain atmospheres, as the consciousness of nakedness to Adam and Eve. It is true that in the institution where I attended, as in many other rural colleges in New England, I was backed up by a majority of healthy-minded, hardy men, of real mark and worth, children of honest toil and self-respecting poverty, who were bravely working their way up through education to the prizes and attainments of life. Simple economies were therefore well understood and respected in the college. Nevertheless there is something not altogether vulgar in the attractions which wealth enables one to throw around himself. I was a social favorite in college, and took a stand among my fellows as a writer and speaker, and so had a considerable share of that sincere sort of flattery which college boys lavish on each other. I was invited and made much of by some whose means were ample, whose apartments were luxuriously and tastefully furnished, but who were none the less good scholars and high-minded gentlemanly fellows. In their vacations I had been invited to their houses, and had seen all the refinement, the repose, the ease and the quietude that comes from the possession of wealth in the hands of those who know how to use it. Wealth in such hands gives opportunities of the broadest culture, ability to live in the wisest manner, freedom to choose the healthiest surroundings both for mind and body, not restricted by considerations of expense; and how could I think it anything else than an object ardently to be sought?