Then in the April of that year, about the time the woods were turning green and he began to look toward them with the old longing now grown stronger, a great thing happened to Webster. [Illustration: chapter I--end decoration] [Illustration: chapter II--title decoration] II THE SCHOOL One clear morning of that budding month of April, a professor from one of the two institutions of learning in the city stood before the pupils of the high school. He was there to fulfill his part of an experimental plan which, through the courtesy of all concerned, had been started upon its course at the opening of the session the previous autumn: that members of the two faculties should be asked to be good enough to come--some one of them once each month--and address the school on some pleasant field or by-field of university work, where learning at last meets life. That is, each professor was requested to appear before the ravenous pupils of the high school with a basket of ripe fruit from his promised land of knowledge and to distribute these as samples from an orchard which each pupil, if he but chose, could some day own for himself. Or if he could not quite bring anything so luscious and graspable as fruit, he might at least stand in their full view on the boundary of his kingdom and mark out, across that dubious Common which lies between high school and college, a path that would lead a boy straight to some one of the world's great highways of knowledge. Eight professors had courteously responded to this invitation and had disclosed eight splendid roadways of the world's study. The Latin professor had opened up his colossal Roman-built highway with its pictures of the ages when all the world's thoroughfares led to Rome. The professor of Greek had disclosed the longer path which leads back to Hellas with its frieze of youth in eternal snow. The professor of Astronomy had taken his band of listeners forth into the immensities of roadless space and had all but lost them and the poor little earth itself in the coming and going of myriads of entangled stars. Eight professors had come, eight professors had gone, it was now April, a professor of Geology, as next to the last lecturer, stood before them. Interest in the lectures had steadily mounted from the first and was now at highest pitch. He faced an audience eager, intelligent, respectful and grateful. On their part they consented that the man before them embodied what he had come to teach--the blending of life and learning. Plainly the study of the earth's rocks had not hardened him, acquaintance with fossils had not left him a human fossil. And he hid the number of his years within the sap of living sympathies as a tree hides the notation of its years within the bark. Letting his eyes wander over them silently for a moment, he began without waste of a word--a straightforward and powerful personality.