time of mental awakening as one of the happi-
est in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me
to the world of ideas; when one first enters
that world everything else fades for a time,
and all that went before is as if it had not
been. Yet I found curious survivals; some of
the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting
for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious
young men among the students who had come
up to the University from the farms and the
little towns scattered over the thinly settled
State. Some of those boys came straight from
the cornfields with only a summer's wages in
their pockets, hung on through the four years,
shabby and underfed, and completed the
course by really heroic self-sacrifice. Our
instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of
the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young men just
out of graduate schools. There was an atmos-
phere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright
hopefulness about the young college that had
lifted its head from the prairie only a few
years before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our
instructors. There were no college dormitories;

[[292]]

p291 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p292w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p293

v?