Meanwhile, during the lulls in house settling, I took the college catalogue and selected a course of studies. It was an enticing feast before which I sat: I felt like a lad having to choose from fifteen nectar flavors of ice cream, only the courses of study from which I had the privilege of choosing went into the hundreds. Almost every theme of my desire was spread before me; explorations into literature, social life, fine arts, science, language, and economics. Old yearnings could be abundantly gratified at last: a formidable list of professors and a more formidable list of studies awaited my option. Evangelical University had given me the foundations of an education, the Seminary had given me the technical knowledge of my profession, at last I had come to the studies that should broaden my outlook, extend my habits of thought beyond the narrow groove of my vocation, and link me to the great world-thought. I put down Italian so that at last I might, with my own ears, hear Dante speak to me through his euphonious and inspired Cantos, and I chose a course in which Goethe should at last be met face to face. I also determined to test my theology in a science course to find out for myself if God and the forces of Nature were actually engaged in undying warfare. I chose, also, a course in composition, which had in it all the lure towards authorship and the fascination of literary creation. My technical studies in the Seminary had prepared me to secure from the college the highest inspiration I should ever receive from books. Early in the month of August, my wife and I started from the village in a buggy for a drive over the hill roads to the college. My wife reminded me, during the drive, of the strangeness of the situation: of the fact that five years previously she had received her degree from her _alma mater_ and that she was now on the way to witness the matriculation of her husband. Midway on the route we drove through an abandoned village, past a once commodious church, a mill, and several houses, all storm bent and in forsaken ruin. We rode along sand-rutted highways which seemed to take us farther and farther away from living creatures. We passed acres and acres of stumps showing where the axes and saws of woodsmen had left a permanent scar in the forestry of the back-roads. Then we emerged on the first street of a quaint, slumberous town whose green and drab-shuttered white houses hid demurely behind screens of elm and of maple. On the outskirts of this village we found ourselves on a sandy plain which sloped down towards a wide river. On the opposite bank, set like gleaming red and white flowers in a bed of green, were towers, windows, houses, chimneys: acres of them, a mile distant, scattered over a narrow elevated plain behind which rolled hills far to the North, to the East and to the South, their sky-lines lost in clouds.