Every day in chapel the President spoke in his cold tones of character moulding, and held up before his hearers Puritan models. On Sundays the little tutor went to the principal church of the place, and a kind of essay that seemed to him nothing but washed-out New Englandism was thrown out to him. The text-books were all those of New England writers; all the manners and customs about the college were copied after New England colleges; the very compositions that he had to correct contained allusions to the Pilgrim Fathers and sturdy New England character and noble Puritan traits until the little tutor began to wish that there never had been a Plymouth Rock. He wondered how everyone else seemed to stand it so well. But they had been brought up on it and never knew anything different, and could not conceive of any one's not thinking as they did and as their fathers did and as their great-grandfathers had done, and pitied (only Stacy doubted if they could pity) any family that did not have a piece of the Mayflower to worship. The most aggravating feature of it, to the little tutor, was that they were so very self-satisfied about it all, never dreaming that there could be anyone so barbarous as not to envy their New England blood, and it was this attitude that used to make the little tutor indignant and cause him to wish he could be sarcastic, as one of his professors used to be: how he would pitch into them! But the worst of it was that he realized his diminutiveness and his boyishness; so he felt helpless and baffled, and he had to submit to the cold indifference and haughty air of superiority worn by those two young assistants not much older than himself, who graduated from such a miserable little unheard-of college. Stacy thought that if they had gone to his college they would have had some of the conceit taken out of them. He thought he might stand it all as far as he was concerned, but he felt somehow as if they were insulting his college in their treatment of himself, her representative. He blushed to think how poor a representative he was. It was just at this point in his discouragement that he had an opportunity which he had often longed for. At last he would have a chance to show them what was in him. This would be his final stroke, he told himself, and he staked his all upon it. He was to lead the prayer-meeting. These prayer-meetings were attended by the college, the academy, and even the professors.