The next day I screwed up my courage to complain to the commandant. He was a very tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought through the Spanish and Boer wars and now, in times of peace, was reduced to teaching the manual of arms and simple drill formations to young sons of the rich. He was the most pompous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever met. One could see it on his handsome face. He heard my complaint through. Then, because, being an ignorant "plebe," I had forgotten to salute him, he made me perform that act and retell the whole story word for word. But he could not change my room until I had agreed to take a cot in the general dormitory--this being reserved for students who paid less tuition. "You may write your aunt," he said stiffly, twirling his long mustaches, "that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be more--er, more congenial." I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I had the plague! I felt sorry for myself. I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on the corner and passed me an occasional lofty jest--and a thousand other things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness. The school was comfortable enough. It was a huge, barn-like affair, built in the previous generation and hardly ever repainted since then, to look at it. The towers at either end of it had tin and battered battlements, and the flanks of steps which went up the hill on which it stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds of boys who had marched upon them, each succeeding year. It was so with the stairs all through the building: each step had a shallow, smooth cup which years of treading had ground out. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's antiquity. There was a large parade ground at the back of the building. Its grass was brown and mealy, and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side, jutted up from the center of it like a long, lone fin. In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall, stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged by the British in Revolutionary days--but it may have been only a fable. I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson has its Revolutionary oak--but, at the time, it made a deep impression on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches against my dormitory window.