I half stumbled from that car, thanking God that He had allowed me this sweet day. Here I was on the platform at last. There was no one about. A Sabbath quiet lingered over everything. The black splinters on the platform went like knife blades between the soles of my worn shoes.
Groat’s was a very small station. Some sort of a village lay behind it. I asked a man on the street corner if this was where Evangelical University could be found. He pointed away from the village in the direction of a rutted, clay road bordered by a line of houses on stilts which ended in a pasture fence made from dry stumps interlocked. “The place’s up thar!” mumbled the man as he moved the morsel of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “You’ll run smack inter it ef yo’ keeps ergoin’.” “How far about?” I asked. “Uh, ’bout a mile or mo’, I guess.”
The fumes of gas half choked me. They drowned out the perfumes from decaying leaves which lay thick on the streets. It was a land given over to gas, evidently, for instead of cows grazing in the flat pastures, latticed derricks towered over oil and gas wells. In place of the twitter of Fall songsters reaching me from the trees along the roadside, came the mournful creaking of oil pumps and the gasps and barks from the sputtering engines. A well had just been shot. A crowd of spectators stood at the base of a derrick whose latticework glistened with the black baptism of oil, and the dead grass on which the spectators stood was soaked by a tarry iridescence; the thick, black, greasy mess which had spouted up from the torn heart of the underworld.
I walked along a board walk which gave me a level path over little brooks, open culverts, house drains, and masses of surface gas mains. It took me up a slight grade in a lonesome part of the road where were neither houses nor trees. I stood on the crest of the hill looking ahead for the University. It stood on the open plain ahead of me, in full sight, Evangelical University!
I had never seen a college before. I had feasted my imagination on photographs of the world’s leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Harvard. I had revelled in the Tom Brown type of literature which has for its background armorial gateways, ivy-clothed turrets in which sparrows twitter all the day; which showed myriads of mullioned windows peeping shyly through the branches of sedate, century oaks; which showed grassy-carpeted lawns, yew gardens, swans breasting placid, rose-fringed lakes, lakes girded by pebbled paths whereon walked pale, lanky scholars in board caps and mourning gowns, walking with bulky tomes of Latin on their palms in serene meditation!
And there the reality of a college, Evangelical University, spread itself for my contemplation, a heart-choked contemplation, because that view shattered a lifetime’s romance! It brought to mind a group of tenements surrounding a big square, brick grammar school. The buildings stood open to the glare of the sun, for there were no tall trees for shade. The smaller houses, little cheaply constructed cottages, stood on cedar posts and were so fragile that the first tempest might readily twist them from their anchorages and carry them tumbling down the fields like empty hat-boxes.
After the armorial-gatewayed universities of my dreams had completely melted away, and the reality in its Puritan, pioneer severity challenged me, I took a firm hold on my slate-colored baggage and strode rapidly on towards my goal.
“What do you want for ninety dollars a year?” I argued with myself. “It’s your chance, and that’s enough.”
I soon came to a newly plowed road which led to the first of the university buildings. The hot sun had not been thirsty enough to suck all the rain which had fallen on the new road in the last storm. The clayey earth had mixed with it and formed a broth which waited for the first unwary foot to slip from the springy board walk, which led over it.
Directly ahead, I saw a salmon-colored, clapboarded building squat and frail like an evangelist’s tabernacle, over which I read on a sign the following explanatory inscription: