came home to mend, and new and nice knitted socks went now and then to replace the worn ones; but that commerce was not frequent nor large; where there was so little to make, it was of necessity that there should not be too much to mend; and alas! if shirt-bosoms gave out, the boys buttoned their coats over them and studied the harder.  There were wants they did not tell; those that were guessed at, they knew, cost many a strain at home; and were not all met then.  But they had not gone to Shagarack to be’ smart,’ —­ except mentally.  That they were.

They were favourites, notwithstanding.  Their superiors delighted in their intellectual prominence; their fellows forgave it.  Quietly and irresistibly they had won to the head of their respective portions of the establishment, and stayed there; but the brilliancy and fire of Rufus and the manliness and temper of his brother gained them the general good-will, and general consent to the place from which it was impossible to dislodge them.  Admiration first followed elder brother, and liking the younger; till it was found that Winthrop was as unconquerable as he was unassuming; as sure to be ready as to be right; and a very thorough and large respect presently fell into the train of his deservings.  The faculty confided in him; his mates looked up to him.  There was happily no danger of any affront to Winthrop which might have called Rufus’s fire disagreeably into play.  And for himself, he was too universally popular.  If he was always in the foreground, everybody knew it was because he could not be anywhere else.  If Winthrop was often brought into the foreground, on great occasions, every soul of them knew it was because no other would have dignified it so well.  And besides, neither Winthrop nor Rufus forgot or seemed to forget the grand business for which he was there.  With all their diversity of manner and disposition, each was intent on the same thing, —­ to do what he had come there to do.  Lasting eminence, not momentary pre-eminence, was what they sought; and that was an ambition which most of their compeers had no care to dispute with them.

“Poor fellows!” said a gay young money-purser; “they are working hard, I suppose, to get themselves a place in the eye of the world.”

“Yes sir,” said the President, who overheard this speech; —­ “and they will by and by be where you can’t see them.”

They came home for a few weeks in the summer, to the unspeakable rejoicing of the whole family; but it was a break of light in a cloudy day; the clouds closed again.  Only now and then a stray sunbeam of a letter found its way through.

One year had gone since the boys went to College, and it was late in the fall again.  Mr. Underhill, who had been on a journey back into the country, came over one morning to Mr. Landholm’s.

“Good morning!” said the farmer.  “Well, you’ve got back from your journey into the interior.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Underhill, —­ “I’ve got back.”