It is with such sympathetic imagination that the most profitable approach can be made to the American undergraduate. To see him as he really is, one needs to follow him into his laboratory or lecture-room, where he engages with genuine enthusiasm in those labors through which he expresses his temperament, his inmost ideals, his life’s choice. Indeed, to one who knows that to sympathize is to learn, the soul windows of this inarticulate, immature, and intangible personality will sometimes be flung wide. On some long, vague walk at night beneath the stars, when the great deeps of his life’s loyalties are suddenly broken up, one will discover the motive of the undergraduate, and below specious attempts at concealment, the self-absorbed, graceful, winsome spirit. Here one is held by the subtle charm of youth lost in a sense of its own significance, moving about in a mysterious paradise all his own, “full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life.” [Illustration: Old South Middle, Yale University] In this portrait one sees the real drift of American undergraduate life--the life that engaged last year in North American institutions of higher learning 349,566 young men, among whom were many of America’s choicest sons. Thousands of American and Canadian fathers and mothers, some for reasons of culture, others for social prestige, still others for revenue only, are ambitious to keep these students in the college world. Many of these parents, whose hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college education. And when we have found, below all his boyish pranks, dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is a true glass to give back to the nation its own image. HIS PASSION FOR REALITY Early in this search for the predominant traits of the college man one is sure to find a passion for reality. “We stand for him because he is the real thing,” is the answer which I received from a student at the University of Wisconsin when I asked the reason for the amazing popularity of a certain undergraduate. The American college man worships at the shrine of reality. He likes elemental things. Titles, conventions, ceremonies, creeds--all these for him are forms of things merely. To him The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that.