“Hello, Quarles!” greeted the washerman, in great embarrassment at our discovery of him, “I didn’t expect you!” A Southern drawl was evident in his speech. He was about to take off his apron, when the Irishwoman, throwing a frown of dissatisfaction in my direction, growled: “Mister Hirshey, an’ don’t you be lavin’, mind you. Them things’ve got to be done. You can talk while you work; but work you must, and the young gentlemen can go hang till you’ve time, if they care!” Squeem’s waxen cheeks, which seemed before to have no signs of blood about them, flushed, and he said, apologetically, as he resumed his churning, “Only ten minutes more, Quarles. We can talk, and then we can go to the room.” I was introduced to the student and recognized in him the one whom I had passed on the campus, time and time again in the winter, with his shivering body fitted to ill-measured clothes, and his goose-fleshed wrists and ungloved hands hanging like dead weights from below his coat sleeves. Ten minutes later, after I had watched the Southerner dip out the dripping mass of laundry and put it through the wringer, we were conducted into the dark kitchen with its odor of cabbage, and ascended by a wabbly stairway to the loft, one half of which was given to Squeems for his abode. A greasy, sour odor of cooking permeated the room. It was lighted by two narrow panes of glass fitted to a makeshift frame, and covered by a curtain of imitation tapestry, with the design of a red Swiss house half buried amid gray bushes and a row of stiff, brown poplars. A cot bed stood in a corner with a bundle of warm quilts in confusion on it, for evidently our host had little skill in his housekeeping. A packing case, on end, with the open side towards us, had been skilfully transformed into book shelf, storage place and desk. A short row of text books was ranged on the packing case. Besides a kitchen chair there was no other seat, save a tin-covered trunk from which Squeem had to take a few dishes, an oil stove and a bread tin,--his dining apparatus,--before it could be utilized for a seat. The following half hour was spent by Quarles and the Southerner in the pronunciation, the translation, and oratorical interpretation, not only of the chorus part of the play, which would be sung, but of the Blind Prophet’s thrilling lines, which Quarles recited before Squeem with even more spirit than he had to me, for, he explained, as we left the house: “That poor fellow may be in the back-waters of college, but he’s got a really excellent mind. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him come near to leading his class in scholarship. I like him--that Squeem,” and then my blind companion quoted, with great impressiveness, “‘Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon his throne, a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his ... originality.’” Then the night of the Greek play arrived in which Quarles and his strange friend were to appear.