It chanced that one of my studies, the life and works of Goethe, took me to a particular section of the reference room where the shelves of Sociology and Economics filled considerable space. As I made my excursions into the section, I became accustomed to the presence of a serious-faced Senior who was constantly occupied with books and periodicals from those two departments. It became natural for us, as the term advanced, to ask one another the time or to borrow pencils or paper. Finally these approaches to intimacy developed into a friendship; into a ripe friendship which included visits to one another’s rooms, long walks, communings in the club-room and ante-class conversations: on all these occasions a true exchange of serious and most profitable confidences taking place. Thurber, for that was my companion’s name, though the son of a very wealthy father and accustomed to the finer touches of society life, had undergone, in his contact with the college, one of those conscience awakening, ambition refining and ideal lifting experiences which our president informed us, time and time again, should be the final results of a true, college education. Thurber’s father was one of that type of American men who boast that their success has been attained through self-improvement and self-education and who crystallize their own peculiar and fortunate experience into formal axioms, on which every one else must seek success. Thurber’s father had to his credit at the time a very large textile mill in a textile city in the South and it had been his supreme desire that his son, immediately on quitting High School, should go into the industry, work his way through it, and take charge of it in the end. But Thurber had no inclination towards lint and the stifling heat of a cotton mill, and he had so informed his father. He also told him that nothing less than four years at a college, where he could meet fellows worth meeting, would please him.