Fifteen minutes later our horse had dragged us toilsomely up a steep roadway on either side of which were a few scattered houses, the outposts of the college town, and brought us right into the midst of the college campus itself, a very green oasis surrounded by a hollow square of college structures. Yes, the Fence was there, a double line of it with the grass worn off where Seniors’ sacred feet had rubbed! just as in my boyish speculations I had always conceived a college with its Fence. Very near the green, too, lay a solid stone sarcophagus of a drinking fountain: just the sort which, in my boyish speculations and boyish reading, I had seen used for the baths of recalcitrant Freshmen and too obtrusive Sophomores. Over on the north side a snow-white meeting-house fronted us with a stiff, proud chest, and with its hexagonal bell-tower rising above the roof like the smoke-stack of a railway engine, made one expect to see it start puffing forward over the campus, with a very tiny, Greek-pillared vestry accompanying it, like a colt engine, destined, sometime later, perhaps, to grow into a meeting-house, like its companion. Across the street from where we had entered stood a brick tavern, under whose canopy an old coach waited equipped with glass doors, outside seats, and with thick leather straps to keep the pliant springs from sending the body of the coach leaping off the wheels at the “thank-you-ma’ams.” To the left we discovered a huge square brick structure with a fenced-in roof faced by a spacious walled-in porch, with pillar-supported roof which, we learned, was the combined college club and commons.
Screened by the arching trees and massed in companies of twos and threes, fives and sixes, were recitation halls, a Renaissance museum, a stone chapel, a power house, numerous dormitories, a snow-white observatory, a gymnasium, and last, a stone tower crowning a knoll and dominating the campus.
The dean gave me my papers, approved my courses of studies, and then sent my wife and me on an inspection of available dormitory rooms, for I should have to reside at the college six days out of seven.
After the penury of Evangelical University and the quaint compactness of the Seminary, the broad acres, costly, comfortable buildings and lavish size of the college gripped my imagination. We threaded our way past a set of dormitories, through a wooded road, and entered a rustic park where Commencement festivities were held every June. We passed sedate rows of professorial residences fronted by hedges and smooth-clipped lawns. Over to the south we viewed a fenced-in athletic field; a mass of green with ovals and straightaways of black cinders, and with bleachers and a grandstand at one end: the place where, fully as much as in the college buildings, the culture of youth went on: the culture of health, of muscular skill, and of moral temper.
A janitor—a young man with a broad forehead and gentle ways—extracted a bunch of keys and showed us into a very old dormitory where were single rooms, double rooms, quadruple and sextuple rooms; according to taste, but no room which met with my approval, especially when the dormitory bore such a sinister name as Demon Cottage, a corruption of Damon Cottage. The janitor, who turned out to be, himself, a graduate of the college, on learning that I was an aspirant for the ministry, promptly advised me to examine a room in the Christian Association building. This we did, and when he had guided my wife and me up three flights of stairs and thrown open the door of a massive, square room, with shop windows for light, I said,
“Isn’t this the college Socialistic Hall, or the band practise chamber?”
“No, this is merely a double, dormitory room,” he admitted. “Sixty dollars a year for each occupant with an extra bedroom over there and an enormous storeroom through that door.”
“Well,” I concluded, after some discussion, “a flat-full of furniture would hardly furnish the center of the room, but there’s sure to be a good circulation of air, and that is important. I think I’d better take it.”
When we returned to the campus we discovered a group of canvas-clad students punting a football while a group of Freshmen, with eyes bulging out of their heads, looked on in worshipful wonder, for Ellis, Barton, and Chipman, three of the Varsity team, were in the advance guard of athletes engaged in early practise.
The janitor had sent us to “Durritt’s Barn” where, he informed us, we should be able to pick up a team load of dormitory furniture at second-hand for very little money. “Durritt’s Barn” was actually a barn attached to a pleasant little house which had been transformed, by a very energetic Junior, into a second-hand furniture store. The Junior, whose name I learned was Garden, presented himself from behind a bewildering mass of dusty rugs, topsy-turvy mission chairs, and sectional book shelves, and picked his way to us through a narrow aisle made by massed heaps of bedsteads, mattresses, chiffoniers, tables, and desks. When we expressed amazement at his business audacity in having such a mass of second-hand furnishings on his hands, he informed us that we had not seen it all and then he led us up a stairway to the loft where we discovered another heaped up mass of material.