All through the morning we traveled; over high trestles, through deep cuts, skirting tobacco fields, whirling through little settlements until at last we were rolled to the deck of a massive iron ferry and, still in the cars, were taken across the lake and landed at Detroit. Meanwhile, I had parted company with Harlan, who had told me to “keep right at it,” meaning thereby, a college education. Transfer after transfer was made for another night and a day, each time the trains seemed to get slower, to stop more at stations, while the cities grew less frequent. Friday turned into Saturday, Saturday into Sunday, and by Sunday, too, we plunged into an overpowering odor of gas. “Is the lamp leaking?” I asked the trainman mournfully. “It’s terrible. It must be leaking. It makes me seasick.” The man laughed. “Oh, you’re in the gas belt,” he said. “It’s in the air. You will get used to it. I can’t smell it at all, though at first it smells like being right in a gas house, doesn’t it?” The gas tinged everything; food and drink. I felt like going to sleep to lose the sense of it. But deeper and deeper into it the train plunged, without mercy. “If you’ve got a piece of silver about you,” said the trainman, “a watch-chain or anything of gold or silver, this air will turn it black soon enough. But you’ll get used to it,” he added comfortingly enough. “I shall have to,” I complained, gloomily. “It tastes as if all the gas works in the world had exploded about here.” Finally I was nearing Groat’s Crossing, the seat of Evangelical University. The train deposited me at a station within twelve miles of it, where I should have to take an accommodation four hours later. There was nothing to see in the place where I waited, but glaring brick buildings and houses on stilts. So I waited around the hot, splintered platform, seated now on a truck, watching a group of young men reading sections of a Sunday paper, or walking miserably up and down wishing for the train, for the gas had gotten into my system, and I felt lonesome, miserable. I might have gone to sleep in the waiting room, but the seats were spoiled for beds by having iron arm rests at intervals of two feet. I tried to thread myself through these, at full length, but could not. There was nothing to do, but stand around and taste gas, until the Groat’s Crossing train came. With great joy I watched the accommodation come into the station. Only twelve more miles between me and Evangelical University! The end of three days’ travel. Three days from the cotton mills! In that thought I renewed my spirit. Soon I should at least be NEAR a college! College! For me! It was the anticipation of a first watch twenty times intensified. I, go to college! Look back in the genealogies of the Priddys, rooted back in Britain’s centuries, and lay your finger on a single member of it who ever went beyond the secondary school! And there was the brakeman calling, inconsequently, “Groat’s Crossing!”