Makes his hue so ashen white." But, when broadening day shone bright, Froze to despair her shivering dread. None who have seen that leaden mask Over loved features greyly spread, "Whose superscription this?" need ask. Soft she unclosed the door, and said, Only three short weeks ago. O mournful vigils, lingering long! Over the blank of grief, Haply some sudden sound withoutA sheep-dog's bark, or schoolboy's shout, Or careless whistler passing nearMay, unaware, pierce the dull ear, And feeble, mystic wonder wake, And straight the web of fancy break; The awful Presence over all Hovering unseen, a brooding pall. "O, look! what change is there? can hope revive? Lift his head gently, give him air—” As drive Strong winds through a thunder-cloud, Athwart, on either side, its blackness, The heaviness, the livid hue; Serene, ethereal brightness lent. eyes unclosed; their gaze intent Sudden, deep-thrilling, did they hear, "Land ahead!" The words of welcome rose; Then he sank back in isolate repose. "Let go the anchor." Now, the port is won. O happy mariner! at last, And the ravening breakers' roll, The glorious city on a height New comers through the floods of death; Felt softly blow a passing breath This could not last for mortal strain, Yet a refulgent glimpse of Heaven, Never by cloud or storm-blast riven, Ray from love divine, shall dwell enliege cust humon MY FRIEND MR. BEDLOW: OR, REMINISCENCES OF AMERICAN COLLEGE LIFE. BY CARL BENSON, AUTHOR OF FIVE YEARS IN AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY," ETC. IN TWO PARTS: PART I. BE so good as to transport yourself in time backward for rather more than twenty years, and in space westward as far as New Haven. What New Haven? There is one place, if not more, of the name in England; possibly others in Scotland and Ireland; but the New Haven I mean is half the capital of the state of Connecticut. Half the capital? Literally so. It divides the honour of being the state metropolis with Hartford, and the state legislature meets in each city alternately. New Haven has the reputation, and justly so, of being a very pretty place. I have sometimes compared it to the environs of Cheltenham, mutatis mutandis, which in this case must be trans Two ones; not a very good comparison, but the best that occurs. It is one of the few cities in the world where birds fly and bees hum at large in the streets. long avenues, crossing each other at right angles, contain the book-stores (Anglicè booksellers) and the grocerystores, and all the other "stores," and the hotels and principal boardinghouses-all the business of the place, in fact; and the remaining streets are occupied, not by the "upper ten" exactly -in the time we write of, Willis had not yet invented the upper ten,-but by private dwellings almost exclusively; neat little white wooden houses,-cottages you might call them,—and much "greenery" all about, and the birds and bees aforesaid; altogether, a very good specimen of the rus in urbe.. write. Since then it has not entirely escaped the progress of modern improvement. It has big brown stone "stores," and stone-or imitation of it-private houses, and a more ambitious look generally. It is said that there are young ladies who waltz; perhaps there are even fast horses. But in the year 183- it was a truly unsophisticated, country-like place, at least half a century behind New York in all the externals of material civilization. It is not, however, the place that you are to notice at all, but its inhabitants, or rather a very small portion, numerically speaking, of its inhabitants-the five hundred students of Yale College. Five hundred we may call them in round numbers, including the graduate professional students,-not a great multitude, but they are conspicuous enough everywhere, notwithstanding the absence of any academical costume. The difference between "town" and "gown" is always strongly marked, even when the "gown" has no gown. The bursch may wear no beard, or cap, or other peculiar mark, yet he is never to be mistaken for the philister. The greenest "fresh" at Yale may be distinguished with half an eye from the "town-loafer." Suppose it then to be a fine spring noon; let us walk down this long street, which extends from the college to the post-office. The municipal authorities, wise without knowing it, have placed the latter at a considerable distance from the former; else it is to be feared that many of the students would never take any exercise at all. The Yalensians are great correspondents, and great devourers of newspapers; and, the postman being an institution quite unknown to New Haven, they are forced to fetch and carry for themselves; besides, this is the fashionable promenade of the town, so we are sure to meet many parties and groups of these youths. They are about the average age of English upper-form public schoolboys, for they usually enter at fifteen, and "go out," as a Cantab would call it" graduate," as they call it at nineteen. They are not quite the average size of the schoolboys aforesaid, for they grow later and longer; but, in spite of this, they have ten times more the air of men. Not finer specimens of animal development; we have just remarked that they do not attain their full growth so soon, nor, on the other hand, do I mean that they show any signs of premature dissipation; but they have a self-possessed, at-their-case, independent, don't-care-a-monosyllable-for-anybody, air, that it would be hard to match among the youth of any other country, not excepting those of France, who are supposed to be particularly forward, and, in some respects, are so. Take at random any three of these young men (they would be fearfully insulted if you were to call, them boys), the odds are that you may set up one of the three without warning before fifteen hundred men, and he will extemporize them a speech about things in general and the politics of the country in particular. Or he will charge a drawing-room full of ladies with equal gallantry; only then you must not take him altogether without preparation; he must have time to make his most elaborate toilette-otherwise he would be disconcerted indeed. For dress is rather a vanity of these youths, as you may see at a very superficial glance. They have small feet, and are proud of them, to judge from the delicate, lady-like boots they wear. Most of them sport kid gloves, and some of them light kid gloves. Many of them delight in fancy caps, as being more picturesque, and at the same time more convenient, than the common domestic hat. Their dress appears to be got up on what some one calls the Frenchman's theory of dress, a combination of colours; and they have also a continental, or, if you prefer it, a flash tendency in the matter of chains, pins, and studs. If it had been a month or two earlier in the season, you would have seen most of them enveloped in magnificent fullcircle blue cloth cloaks, at least £12 worth of cloth and velvet to each cloak. It must be observed, however, that these melodramatic envelopes were preferred to overcoats on grounds of use as well as show. In their hurried preparation for the very early morning chapel, the students not unfrequently donned an old dressing-gown, in lieu of coat, and entirely neglected the minor details of cravat and waistcoat, the charitable mantle supplying all deficiencies of looks or warmth. You But these elegant youths do not comprise the whole body of Yalensians. Contrasted with them we remark many students of a very different type. Menold men, comparatively speaking—say from twenty-four to thirty years of age! Their attire is not only unfashionable, but positively shabby. Coats of "homemade" cloth, threadbare and rusty, worn to holes at the cuffs, and strangely bound there with velvet,-the attempt at converting a patch into an ornament only making the poverty of the garment more conspicuous,-cowhide shoes, "shocking bad" hats, coarse linen, of doubtful whiteness. These are the "beneficiaries," the students who have taken to the ministry late in life. might compare them to the smallcollege fellow-commoners at Cambridge, with this important difference, that whereas the latter are wealthy, the "beneficiaries" are much the reverse. Indeed, they derive their popular name from the pecuniary benefit which they receive from the college. Various charitable legacies and donations give them about £15 a year each, and that is all the actual cash some of them can depend upon. Now, though New Haven is not a dear place, still a man hardly well board himself there for less than two dollars-that is, about eight shillings a week. It is evident, therefore, that some other means must be resorted to to make up the deficit. Some beneficiaries absent themselves during a portion of the winter to teach schools, their own studies necessarily suffering meantime. One of them rings One of them rings the college bell (he earns his money, poor fellow !). Some of them sleep in little closets adjoining the "recitation" (lecture) rooms, and get their lodging gratis in return for keeping the said recitation-rooms in order. Several of can and for so doing get their own meals free of expense. Cambridge sizars used to do the same thing: the practice has continued in democratic America long after it was abolished in aristocratic England; for all I know to the contrary, it exists in full force to the present day. Are you curious to know how these men are treated by their fellow-students? They mingle on terms of perfect equality, but their intercourse is far from being perfectly genial. Not on account of the beneficiaries' poverty, nor yet altogether from the difference of age, though that has something to do with it; but rather owing to unfortunate theological differences, of which more hereafter. Before the "faculty"-that is, the college authorities-they all stand on a par. Indeed, if there were any preference to be shown, the beneficiaries would most naturally come in for it, since the tutor has nothing possible to expect from the rich student, whom the chances are he will never see when the latter has once left college, whereas he feels a strong sympathy for the poor student, having, in perhaps the majority of cases, sprung from that class himself. When speaking of dress and ornaments just above, we omitted one kind of ornament common to all the students, though the beneficiaries are rather less adorned in this way than the others. You perceive that a large number, probably full half, of them, wear queer trinkets of gold, or gold and enamel, inscribed with Greek letters and various quaint devices. Some of them are broad, flat, old-fashioned watch-keys; others are triangles, stars, or suns, used as "charms," or breloques; others heavy embossed rings, and others again breastpins; the shapes and devices of the breastpins are the most ferociously mystic of all. These are the badges of the secret societies which swarm in every American college. They have different origins, different professed aims, and very different degrees of secrecy. Some scarcely profess to conceal their proceedings from the outsiders, while mystery. One society was a sort of appendix to academic honours, being composed of all who took a certain standing in the junior (third) year. Another was supposed to be made up of the best "speakers" and "writers," especially the latter; candidates for the editorship of the magazines, and gainers of "composition" prizes-English composition, not Latin; though, for that matter, if you were otherwise unobjectionable, writing Latin would qualify you at a pinch almost as well as writing English it certainly was the rarer accomplishment of the two. Others— these were the breastpins generally limited their numbers to a very select few, in the choice of whom personal considerations were presumed to weigh no less than literary. These were awfully mysterious. One of them, the awe and admiration of all freshmen, had a most ferocious pin, with a piratical device of a death's head and crossbones, and—a live skeleton I was going to say,—I mean a real one, in a corner of the room where it met, and an unutterable name (like that of Ancient Rome) known only to the initiated. To belong to this club was a great object of ambition, and its principle of selection seemed to be that two-thirds of its members were about the cleverest and jolliest fellows of their year, and the other third gentlemanly nobodies of some pecuniary means. In spite of all precautions and freemasonry, there was sufficient leakage to make one conclude that the basis of all these associations was the samewhat we may call the great motive principle of an American college-speaking and writing, writing and speaking; while on this the more aristocratic breastpins had crossed the popular Anglo-Saxon institution of grub, with the necessary concomitant of something to drink, which made the breastpins more expensive; and on this account, as well as some others, they admitted few "beneficiaries;" but some of these forced their way even into the piratical sanctuary for talent, or what passes for such, is a great leveller of distinctions ostensible badges, such as rings and bracelets (I assure you I am not joking; there were students who wore bracelets in my time), generally betokened mere symposia, like the B. S. club at Cambridge, which, with its lettered buttons, is the only approach to the American system my English experience supplies me with. But, O reader!-whom I always take somehow to be a Cantabtry and realize this phenomenon at your own alma mater-the Johnian scholars wearing oblong watch-keys, the "Athenæum men star breloques, the " "apostles" enamelled breastpins with an allegorical design of Goethe trampling on the Record, even the dozen Trinity bachelors who meet in one another's rooms on Sunday night to drink coffee and read Shakespeare (if that informal. association still exists), setting up a ring of some peculiar form. A very ridiculous state of things, you would say; and my private opinion about coincides with yours. Every possible club, or combination of Yalensians, had its badge, save only the three great debating societies, called par excellence the literary societies, to one of which every member of the university belonged, and which, probably for that reason, had no decoration peculiar to them.1 And now, even though my friend Bill Bedlow is waiting all this time to be introduced to you, I must go back a little to say something that might perhaps have come in more à propos of the big cloaks and the early chapels. When you see this heterogeneous mass of boys and men doubly heterogeneous, for they come from all parts of the Union, scarcely a state unrepresented, and from all sorts of schools, or no schools at all,— one of the first questions that naturally occurs to you is, by what discipline are 1 Even these made a parade of secrecy, allowing no strangers to be present at their debates, and admitting new members with much formality and a Christy's-minstrel-like "knocking at the door." It is singular that, with all this preparatory training to secrecy, when they get into real life no people let out political secrets so readily as the Americans. Perhaps it is merely a case of "diamond cut |