The Professor is somewhat crusty, it must be owned. It is, however, an acquired and not a natural crustiness. Cause, the fact that at thirty years of age he discovered that he cared more for a certain Miss Spencer than for all the world beside. On intimating this fact to her, she told him that she should always value his friendship; and that she hoped soon to introduce to him her cousin Hugh, “who is,” she added quietly, “to become my husband.” After this the Professor withdrew almost entirely from society, and plunged deeper and deeper into study. Before many years his reputation was cosmopolitan, his head bald, and his life a matter of routine. Boys came and went; and at intervals he repeated before them much of what he knew. It is to these two boys, of whom he thinks now, as he gazes on the picture over the mantel, that he owes his rescue from this lethargic life. What does he see in the picture? He sees behind a chair, in which a boy is sitting, another boy with soft, curling brown hair, deep blue eyes, and dazzling complexion. His features are delicately cut; but the especial beauty of his face is the brilliancy of color in his hair, eyes, and complexion. There is the freshness of youth on his features; and his whole attitude, as he leans over his companion, is full of that quaint grace of boyish tenderness so indefinable and so transitory. The boy in the chair has a face full of strength and weakness. The photograph makes him appear the more striking of the two, though the less handsome. The sunny sweetness of the first face, though it never alters, never becomes wearisome; but the second face is now all love, now disfigured by scorn and hatred, now full of intellect, and glowing with animation, now sullen and morose. The complexion is olive, the eyes brown, the lips strongly cut, yet so mobile as to be capable of every variety of earnest and sneering expression. The face is always, in all its varying phases, the face of one who is not dissatisfied but unsatisfied. This is what the Professor sees, as the firelight throws its glimmer over the room, making grotesque shadows waver fitfully on the pictures and books around him, as well as on the heavy curtains that hide the rays of afternoon light which struggle through the leafy boughs of the old elms in the yard without. As the Professor sits there thinking, he seems to recall again the first visit of Tom and Ned to his room. Tom is a lovely boy,――the original of the standing figure in the photograph; and the Professor had been attracted by his face once or twice when he had met him in the yard, soon after his entrance into college. Still he is surprised, one evening, when he hears a knock at his door, and this Freshman enters half shyly. The Professor asks him to be seated, and then looks at him inquiringly.