Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons

by Donald Grant Mitchell

The floor of the room is rough, and divided by wide seams. The study-table does not stand firmly without a few spare pennies to prop it into solid footing. The bookcase of stained fir-wood, suspended against the wall by cords, is meagrely stocked with a couple of Lexicons, a pair of Grammars, a Euclid, a Xenophon, a Homer, and a Livy. Beside these are scattered about here and there a thumb-worn copy of British ballads, an odd volume of the "Sketch-Book," a clumsy Shakspeare, and a pocket edition of the Bible.

With such appliances, added to the half-score of professors and tutors who preside over the awful precincts, you are to work your way up to that proud entrance upon our American life which begins with the Baccalaureate degree. There is a tingling sensation in first walking under the shadow of those walls, uncouth as they are, and in feeling that you belong to them,—that you are a member, as it were, of the body-corporate, subject to an actual code of printed laws, and to actual moneyed fines varying from a shilling to fifty cents!

There is something exhilarating in the very consciousness of your subject state, and in the necessity of measuring your hours by the habit of such a learned community. You think back upon your respect for the lank figure of some old teacher of boy-days as a childish weakness; even the little coteries of the home fireside lose their importance when compared with the extraordinary sweep and dignity of your present position.

It is pleasant to measure yourself with men; and there are those about you who seem to your untaught eye to be men already. Your chum, a hard-faced fellow of ten more years than you, digging sturdily at his tasks, seems by that very community of work to dignify your labor. You watch his cold, gray eye bending down over some theorem of Euclid, with a kind of proud companionship in what so tasks his manliness.

It is nothing for him to quit sleep at the first tinkling of the alarm-clock that hangs in your chamber, or to brave the weather in that cheerless run to the morning prayers of winter. Yet with what a dreamy horror you wake on mornings of snow to that tinkling alarum!—and glide in the cold and darkness under the shadow of the college-walls, shuddering under the sharp gusts that come sweeping between the buildings,—and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big book, and his head leaning slightly to one side, runs through in gentle and tremulous tones his wonted form of invocation.

Your Division room is steaming with foul heat, and there is a strong smell of burnt feathers and oil. A jaunty tutor with pug nose and consequential air steps into the room—while you all rise to show him deference—and takes his place at the pulpit-like desk. Then come the formal loosing of his camlet cloak-clasp,—the opening of his sweaty Xenophon to where the day's parasangs begin,—the unsliding of his silver pencil-case,—the keen, sour look around the benches, and the cool pinch of his thumb and forefinger into the fearful box of names!

How you listen for each as it is uttered,—running down the page in advance,—rejoicing when some hard passage comes to a stout man in the corner; and what a sigh of relief—on mornings after you have been out late at night—when the last paragraph is reached, the ballot drawn, and—you, safe!

You speculate dreamily upon the faces around you. You wonder what sort of schooling they may have had, and what sort of homes. You think one man has got an extraordinary name, and another a still more extraordinary nose. The glib, easy way of one student, and his perfect sang-froid, completely charm you: you set him down in your own mind as a kind of Crichton. Another weazen-faced, pinched-up fellow in a scant cloak, you think must have been sometime a schoolmaster: he is so very precise, and wears such an indescribable look of the ferule. There is one big student, with a huge beard and a rollicking good-natured eye, whom you would quite like to see measure strength with your old usher, and on careful comparison rather think the usher would get the worst of it. Another appears as venerable as some fathers you have seen; and it seems wonderfully odd that a man old enough to have children should recite Xenophon by morning candle-light!

The class in advance you study curiously; and are quite amazed at the precocity of certain youths belonging to it, who are apparently about your own age. The Juniors you look upon with a quiet reverence for their aplomb and dignity of character; and look forward with intense yearnings to the time when you too shall be admitted freely to the precincts of the Philosophical chamber, and to the very steep benches of the Laboratory. This last seems, from occasional peeps through the blinds, a most mysterious building. The chimneys, recesses, vats, and cisterns—to say nothing of certain galvanic communications, which, you are told, traverse the whole building in a way capable of killing a rat at an incredible remove from the bland professor—utterly fatigue your wonder! You humbly trust—though you have doubts upon the point—that you will have the capacity to grasp it all, when once you shall have arrived at the dignity of a Junior.

As for the Seniors, your admiration for them is entirely boundless. In one or two individual instances, it is true, it has been broken down by an unfortunate squabble with thick-set fellows in the Chapel aisle. A person who sits not far before you at prayers, and whose name you seek out very early, bears a strong resemblance to some portrait of Dr. Johnson; you have very much the same kind of respect for him that you feel for the great lexicographer, and do not for a moment doubt his capacity to compile a dictionary equal, if not superior, to Johnson's.