Harper's Round Table, February 11, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

A very strange old room it was, in a very strange old house, part of which was brick, and part of which was wood. The wood had been cut from the neighboring hill-sides, and the brick had traversed many thousands of miles from across the Atlantic in a little ship with a strange Dutch name. There was but one older house in the street, and from the corner window of the room one could just catch a glimpse of the spires of the college chapel; on winter days when the leaves were off the trees the college buildings could be seen.
The Professor, when he came in, announced his arrival by noisily scraping the soles of his boots against the metal foot-scraper that had been worn down to a thin blade, like an aged razor. The Professor was tall and angular, but it was impossible to tell his age within a dozen years, for his thin hair was very dark, and his face was always very smooth shaven. His position in college was a most peculiar one. He had an endowed professorship, which, odd to relate, he had endowed himself, and there was a term in college parlance that was often applied to the Professor's course in the electives (Sanscrit and archæology), it was known as a snap. But the Professor was a very interesting and well-liked man. He had taken honors at Oxford in the early fifties, and had spent a great deal of money making deep researches into the great libraries of Europe.
But to come back to the room.
It was not dark or dingy, as one might suppose the room of a student would be, but was very bright, with a number of windows. The pattern of the oil-cloth that covered the floor was worn out in regular paths before the big shelves that reached up to the ceiling. There were two large oaken cupboards and a long desk. The only thing that could be called an attempt at ornament was a china figure on the top of one of the cupboards. The Professor had picked this up in France. It was an unmistakable likeness to Benjamin Franklin, but, nevertheless, it had the name George Washington on it in gold lettering. The Professor had bought it as an example of humor in French pottery, which showed that he had a sense of humor himself.