"Are you Professor St. Peter?" he inquired.
Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was his manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young man's sandy hair—the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was fine-looking, he saw—tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.
"I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask your advice. I don't know anybody in the town."
"You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you from?"
"I've never been to high school, sir. That's the trouble."
"Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you from?"
"New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin with a priest down there."
St. Peter smiled incredulously. "How much Latin?"
"I read Cæsar and Virgil, the Æneid."
"How many books?"