Beneath that flapping gray hat his wrinkled face was unusually severe. His eyes really seemed to flash resentment through his green spectacles. The doctor’s remark related to my manipulation of a new rose-sprayer which I had purchased this morning at the village hardware store, and was directing against the pests on my crimson ramblers when he paused to tell me that he had tried that identical device last year and found it worthless. As his shabby old phaeton rounded the corner, I turned the sprayer over to my young undergraduate friend Septimus, and hurried in to set down a few truths about the doctor. He is, as you may already have guessed, the venerable Doctor Experience, of the well-known university that bears his name. He is a person of quality and distinction, and the most quoted of all the authorities on life and conduct. How empty the day would be in which we did not hear some one say, “Experience has taught me--” In the University of Experience the Doctor fills all the chairs; and all his utterances, one may say, are _ex cathedra_. He is as respectable for purposes of quotation as Thomas à Kempis or Benjamin Franklin. We really imagine--we who are alumni of the old doctor’s ivy-mantled knowledge-house, and who recall the austerity of his curriculum and the frugality of Sunday evening tea at his table--that his own courses were immensely profitable to us. We remember well how he warned us against yielding to the persuasions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, illustrating his points with anecdotes from his own long and honorable career. He used to weep over us, too, in a fashion somewhat dispiriting; but we loved him, and sometimes as we sit in the winter twilight thinking of the days that are no more, we recall him in a mood of affection and regret, and do not mind at all that cheerless motto in the seal of the university corporation, “_Experientia docet stultos_,” to which he invariably calls attention after morning prayers. “My young friends,” he says, “I hope and trust that my words may be the means of saving you from much of the heartache and sorrow of this world. When I was young--” This phrase is the widely accepted signal for shuffling the feet and looking bored. We turn away from the benign doctor at his reading-desk, fumbling at that oft-repeated lecture which our fathers and grandfathers remember and quote,--we turn our gaze to the open windows and the sunlight. The philosophy of life is in process of making out there,--a new philosophy for every hour, with infinite spirit and color, and anon we hear bugles crying across the hills of our dreams. “When I was young!” If we were not the politest imaginable body of students,--we who take Doctor Experience’s course because it is (I blush at the confession) a “snap,”--we should all be out of the window and over the hills and far away.