New adventures must be prefaced by new hopes. My entering college meant the starting of a thousand new dreams, ambitions--and seemed to me an opening gate to a land stronger than any I had yet heard of: a land of real men, virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were never petty, whose breadth of mind unfailing. It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death that I took my college entrance examinations. I had taken the "preliminaries" the year before, and I entered upon these "finals" low in spirit, disinterested, very much aware of how poor a training for them this last year at military school had given me. Nevertheless, I managed to pass them. Not brilliantly, to be sure, but by a small margin which left no doubt but that I should be accepted in the freshman class of the city's university. I have not called my alma mater by any other name than this: I do not wish, out of a sense of loyalty, to define it more closely. You will say, before I am through, that I am perverse in that loyalty; perhaps so--but I do not wish to transgress upon it. Suffice it then, that my college days were spent at one of the two universities which New York has within its borders. I shall never forget how my heart bounded when I received, through the mail, that little leather covered book which college men know as the "Freshman Bible." It is the directory of undergraduate activities issued by the university Y. M. C. A., and is sent to all members of the incoming class. I read each little page and its small, fine print as if my life depended upon its reading. When I came to understand that freshman must wear a black, green-buttoned cap upon the campus, a deep awe of collegiate law and order came over me. When I saw the little half-tone prints of the chapel, the gymnasium, the baseball field, I felt that I was glimpsing, before my proper time, the sacred precincts of a land which would be magical, splendid with an eternal sunlight, peopled only with a chivalrous and knightly manhood. I suppose that college was to me, as to most subfreshman, a place of green swards and track meets and those musical harmonies which glee clubs can so throatily accomplish. I was at the hotel in New Hampshire when this book arrived. The very same mail brought me the definite results of my college entrance examinations. I remember that I was just starting to walk down to the lake with my aunt when they arrived. I knew what was in the big ominous envelope--and I was afraid to open it. I crammed it into my coat pocket, careful not to let my Aunt Selina see it, and went on to the boat house, hired a boat and rowed her dutifully around the lake for a full two hours. She remarked upon my silence--but I did not tell her that my fate was in my pocket--and that I dared not look upon it.