He remembered the kind of day it was when he first saw through its autumn trees the scattered buildings of his university.  What impressions it had made upon him as it awaited him there, gray with stateliness, hoary with its honors, pervaded with the very breath and spirit of his country.  He recalled his meeting with his professors, the choosing of his studies, the selection of a place in which to live.  Then had followed what had been the great spectacle and experience of his life—­the assembling of picked young men, all eager like greyhounds at the slips to show what was in them, of what stuff they were made, what strength and hardihood and robust virtues, and gifts and grace for manly intercourse.  He had been caught up and swept off his feet by that influence.  Looking back as he did to that great plateau which was his home, for the first time he had felt that he was not only a youth of an American commonwealth, but a youth of his whole country.  They were all American youths there, as opposed to English youths and German youths and Russian youths.  There flamed up in him the fierce passion, which he believed to be burning in them all, to show his mettle—­the mettle of his state, the mettle of his nation.  To him, newly come into this camp of young men, it lay around the walls of the university like a white spiritual host, chosen youths to be made into chosen men.  And he remembered how little he then knew that about this white host hung the red host of those camp-followers, who beleaguer in outer darkness every army of men.

Then had followed warfare, double warfare:  the ardent attack on work and study; athletic play, good fellowship, visits late at night to the chambers of new friends—­chambers rich in furniture and pictures, friends richer in old names and fine manners and beautiful boyish gallant ways; his club and his secret society, and the whole bewildering maddening enchantment of student life, where work and duty and lights and wine and poverty and want and flesh and spirit strive together each for its own.  At this point he put these memories away, locked them from himself in their long silence.

Near midnight he made his way quietly back into the main hall.  He turned out the lamps and lighted his bedroom candle and started toward the stairway, holding it in front of him a little above his head, a low-moving star through the gloom.  As he passed between two portraits, he paused with sudden impulse and, going over to one, held his candle up before the face and studied it once more.  A man, black-browed, black-robed, black-bearded, looked down into his eyes as one who had authority to speak.  He looked far down upon his offspring, and he said to him:  “You may be one of those who through the flesh are chosen to be damned.  But if He chooses to damn you, then be damned, but do not question His mercy or His justice:  it is not for you to alter the fixed and the eternal.”