To thy raptured eyes revealed But oh! one word of parting say! Sweet, solemn, full, those final accents fell, Pledge of undying peace: he spake, "All's well." Yea, all is well; that last adieu O'er mourning hearts in anguish Effluence ecstatic gushed; They saw Heaven's gates of pearl unfold Paven courts of purest gold, 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, Still whispering: "All is well, is well." H. L. 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. 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. Two 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. Such was it at the period of which I 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-ease, 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 Their 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. 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. 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. You 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 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 them wait on the other students in hall, 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 others shroud themselves in thickest 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 : cross these were the breastpins generallylimited 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 bones, 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 in a transatlantic university. The less 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 diamond." these students kept in order, or is there any pretence of keeping them in order? According to your own ideas and experience, the system will be apt to strike you as a singular mixture of laxity and sternness; but, on further consideration, you will probably be convinced that it is not only the most natural, but the only possible one. First, then, there are no such things known as walls or gates in the establishment. To "gate" or "wall" a refractory student would be simply impossible, for want of the material masonry. There is indeed a law that no one shall be out of his room after ten P.M., but it is as obsolete as those English college statutes which provide for the flogging of freshmen in chapel, or their not walking alone on Sundays. The primitive hours of the old gentlemen and ladies who let lodgings may be supposed to put some check on any noctivagant propensities of their lodgers; but for those students who "room" in college-more than half the whole number-there really is no let or hindrance to their passing the night out, any night and every night of the week, if they choose. But on the other hand, there is a most rigid system of roll-call and muster. To put it into Cantab phraseology, the Yalensians have to keep sixteen chapels and sixteen lectures a week, and that during three terms, which take up full three-quarters of the entire year, instead of less than one-half of it. Yale, like almost all the American colleges, has its particular religion. It belonged to the Congregationalists, a species of democratic Presbyterians, answering, I believe, to the English Independents. The Episcopalians are allowed to go to their own church on Sundays, but even there the monitor pursues them. And suppose a student fails to attend? In that case the process is sufficiently summary. A certain, not very large, number of "absent" marks-say thirty in the course of the year-involves your polite dismission from the institution, no matter how high your moral or intellectual standing. There would have been a great slaughter of the innocents under this system, but for a little elasticity in the practical working of it. The sole excuse for absence was illness; the test of illness was keeping your room, the proof of your having kept your room was your word for it, unless you were stupid enough to run bolt against a tutor. But without supposing any direct violation of truth, there were many cold winter days when to stay in doors for twenty-four hours was no great hardship, and the sick man could always find some friend to bring him his meals. Disturbances of so grave a character that the "faculty" are compelled to notice them, occur very rarely. In such cases the offenders are usually suspended," i.e. rusticated, for a term or longer. Expulsion is sometimes resorted to, pour encourager les autres. Sometimes a whole class, or the greater part of one, rebels, generally for some such silly reason as, that the "recitations"-in plain English the lessons—are too long On such occasion a number of the recalcitrant youth are apt to expel themselves, and the authorities have a habit of sending the "balance" after them for the sake of symmetry. Now then, having duly prepared the way for the introduction of so important a person, let me present to your notice, Mr. William Bedlow, or Bill Bedlow, as his intimate friends, like myself, are permitted to call him, notwithstanding his dignified carriage. "Mr. Bedlow, of New York”—that is the legitimate manner of introducing him-forms the central figure of the group standing in front of that not very magnificent confectioner's across the way. Mr. Bedlow is between nineteen and twenty years of age--you certainly would not take him to be a day older, and you might very well take him to be a year or two younger. His stature rather above medium height; his figure slender, denoting activity rather than strength. His features are delicate, and decidedly handsome, and his black hair has a tendency to curl under the rakish silk-tasselled cap that |