Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young UniversityIrwin, Will
General
Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University
Irwin, Will
College stories, American; Short stories; Stanford (Calif.) -- Fiction; Stanford University -- Fiction
It was during these days that Craig, who taught something to the younger
people, used to lean on the fence and smoke during the afternoons. He
was not much older than many of the students she knew, and she liked
him particularly. He had lumps of something white and sweet, and he
rubbed her head in exactly the right spot. When she had won his
confidence, he told her many things about himself and the College. Once
he had been at another place, a college older than this by a long time
but not so famous. The Overseer of this one had written him to come and
teach there, at a better salary. He explained to her what this
meant--money for the support of his mother, and in a few years the study
in Europe of which he dreamed, and for which he worked and saved, and
beside this the growing up with a new university, from an instructorship
in the present to a full professorship in the wonderful future. He told
her what was promised him, and showed her a picture once of the plan of
the completed university, with its arch and chapel tower and the great
mechanical shops spreading back across her shady pasture to the borders
of the lake.
Then she learned what the death of "the Governor" had brought upon them;
why the horses had been sold and why there were no more hammers nor
chisels ringing against the stone. The farm was losing a thousand
dollars a day, and the Government had seized upon the money they were
building the monument with and was trying to wrest it entirely from the
woman who had stopped once to pet the brood-mare when "the Governor"
was driving in the yard. These things were hard to understand. There
had never been any question of money here that Bonita could remember.
One day she had nosed vainly for the sugar he used to bring; Craig told
her that for two months he had had no money to give his mother; that if
it wasn't for a grocer in Mayfield who was kind to people in trouble,
they would have had nothing to eat. Bonita, remembering the students she
had seen gathering mushrooms, suggested grass; but he told her,
laughing, that only one man to his knowledge had ever lived that way and
he was a king, long ago, in the holy times. He, Craig, would have to
have money. In an old vest he had worn in the East, his mother found a
few pennies and had walked to Palo Alto and spent them for stamps for
the sake of paying for something. After this explanation, Bonita did not
hunt for sugar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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