The sea, for instance, on which Estes, in Number 18, had found such tempestuous experiences. To imagine Estes you have to think of two small, very glistening black eyes shining through a forest of beard like hut lights gleaming like faint stars in the midst of a dense grove. That was all you noticed, at first, about him, for his body was insignificant, unimportant. The little knobs of cheek that came between the eyes and the black beard shone with a dull red glow, like flesh that the winds and the frosts had hardened and tinted. When on the campus, Estes crowned his blackish head with a cow-boy’s sombrero, worn at a rakish, foppish slant, as if he were trying to be reminiscent of a Mexican señor. A man to be called merely a _poseur_ when met on the campus or in the classroom, with his arithmetic, his grammar, his English history, and his black teacher’s Bible in the crook of his arm; a thirty-seven-year-old man with his foot on the first rung of the educational ladder. To most of the students he was known only in the rôle of “elementary student.” But in the confidence of his chamber, among his selected friends, when he opened his record, it was akin to the opening of furnace doors to show the furious white heat of a man’s sinful passion and the dark, twisting, sulphurous smoke of criminal deceit. He had betrayed men and women in selfish conspiracies; had drowned his wit in seas of alcohol; had abandoned his mother and family to the cruelties of poverty and illness; had stolen money and honor from his fellows; had mixed in the cheap and petty evil sports of sailors and tramps; had roamed through the land in the guise of an Indian doctor selling watery and greasy medicaments under a hissing, gasolene torch to confiding purchasers; had held responsible positions in shops; had--there seemed to be no end to his adventures in which the coloring always turned out to be the fact that in all of them he had introduced elements of sin, of criminality, of cruelty. They always ended against those grim stone walls! After walking through the pages of several high-strung romances of vagabondage and clap-trap he had turned to Evangelical University as to the mould for a new character which was to form him over, not only into a socialized being, but into a serviceable, spiritual servant; for after he should have had ingrained on him the elementary knowledge of Grammar, Bible, and History, he planned to take a tent into the world, set it in the midst of the slums for a season, and nightly exhort bad men to become good with the same fervid impulsiveness with which he had formerly exhorted them, under the yellow blaze of gasolene lamps, to buy pills and medicine-cure-alls.