Yes, but it was the second time. He had run from an American university to escape expulsion for having set fire to an outhouse. Then he went straight to New York, which he wanted to see, and stopped till his money was all gone. His father was mad enough about that. I said plainly that I didn’t wonder, and was going to add something by way of improving the occasion, but for a look of such deep sorrow which passed over the boy’s face that I thought his conscience might well do the work better than I could. He opened his bag and took out a photograph, and then his six-shooter--a self-cocking German one, he said, which was quicker and carried a heavier ball than any he had seen in America; and then his pipes and cigar tubes; and then he rolled a cigarette and lighted it; and, as the dawn was now come, began to ask questions about the country. But all in vain; back the scene he was running from came, do what he would. His youngest brother, a little fellow of ten, was down with fever. He had spoilt Christmas for the whole family. It would cut them up awfully. But to a suggestion that he should go straight back he could not listen. No, he was going straight through to California, the best place for him. He had never done any good yet, but he was going to do it now. He had got a letter or two to Californians from some of his fellow-students, which would give him some opening. He wouldn’t see his people for four or five years, till he got something to show them. He would have to pitch right in, or else starve. He would go right into the first thing that came along out there, and make something. As we got further down the line the morning cleared, and we had many fellow-passengers; but my young friend, as I might almost call him by this time, stuck to me, and seemed to get some relief by talking of his past doings and future prospect. I found that he had been at Würzburg for a short time before going to Heidelberg, so had had a student’s experience of two of the most celebrated German Universities. My own ideas of those seats of learning, being for the most part derived from the writings of Mr. Matthew Arnold, received, I am bound to own, rather severe shocks from the evidently truthful experience of one medical student.