"Tell me about the medical schools when you were a student. Not about the professors. I don't want to hear anything about the professors. You wouldn't know anything about _them_, anyhow: no student ever does. But what were the students up to among themselves at nights? The wild ones. I don't want to hear anything about the goody-goody ones. Tell me about the devils--the worst of the devils." The medical schools of those days, as members of the profession yet living can testify if they would, had their stories of student life that make good stories when recited around the fireside with September rain on the roof. The former graduate and non-practitioner was not averse seemingly to reminiscence. Forthwith he entered upon some chronicles and pursued them with that soft, level voice of either betting with you or baptizing you--the voice of gambling in this world or of gambling for the next. As the recitals wound along their channels, the listener's enthusiasm became stirred: by degrees it took on a kindling that was like a wild leaping flame of joy. "But there always has to be a leader," he said, as though forecasting for himself a place of such splendid prominence. "There has to be a leader, a head." "I was the head." The young hunter on the opposite side of the fireplace suddenly threw up his arms and rolled out of his chair and lay on the floor as though he had received a charge of buckshot in one ear. At last, gathering himself up on the floor, he gazed at the tranquil amber pipe and tranquil piper:-- "_You!_" There was a mild wave of the hand by the historian of the night, much as one puts aside a faded wreath, deprecating being crowned with it a second time. "Another shock like that----!" and the searcher for a profession climbed with difficulty into his chair again. For a while there was satisfied silence, and now things took on a graver character:-- "Somehow I feel," said the younger of the men, "that there have been great men all about here. I don't see any now; but I have a feeling that they have been here--great men. I feel them behind me--all kinds of great men. It is like the licks where we now find the footprints and the bones of big game, larger animals that have vanished. There are the bones of greater men in Kentucky: I feel their lives behind me." "They _are_ behind you: the earth is rank with them. You need not look anywhere else for examples. I don't know how far you got in your Homer at school before you were tired of it; but there is the _Iliad_ of Kentucky: I am glad you have begun to read _that_!" The rain on the shingles and in the gutters began to sound like music. The two men alone there in their talk about life, not a woman near, a kind of ragged sublimity. "To be a soldier and to be a farmer--if I could get those two professions together," persisted the youth.