American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women. Kate Stephens

      But from whatever part of the State the students come to their University, he and she commonly come—they are not sent. The distinction is trite, but there is in it a vast difference. In many cases they have made the choice and way for themselves. They have earned money to pay their living while at school, and they expect, during the three, four, or five years they are in their intellectual Canaan, to spend vacations in work—in harvesting great wheat-fields of Philistia, or in some other honest bread-winning. They are so close to nature, and so radiantly strong in individuality, that no one of them, so far as rumor goes, has ever resorted to the commonest method of the Eastern impecunious collegian for filling his cob-webbed purse with gold. The nearest approach I know to such zeal was the instance of the student who slept (brave fellow) scot-free in an undertaker’s establishment. He answered that functionary’s night-bell. Then he earned half-dollars in rubbing up a coffin or washing the hearse; adding to these duties the care of a church, milking of cows, tending of furnaces, digging of flower-beds, beating of carpets, and any other job by which a strong and independent hand could win honest money for books and clothing and food. It was as true for him now as when Dekker, fellow-player with Shakespeare and “a high-flier of wit even against Ben Jonson himself”—to use Anthony à Wood’s phrase—when Dekker sang—

      “Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,

       No burden bears, but is a king, a king.

       O sweet content, O sweet content!

       Work apace, apace, apace,

       Honest labor bears a lovely face,

       Then hey nonny, nonny; hey nonny, nonny.”

      To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of Knox’s theology upon Knox’s own heath, a harvest of forty acres of wheat brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 × 50 × $0.50 = $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of September, before leaving for college, and cut the grain after commencement in June. The blue-green blades barely peeped through the glebe during winter. When springtime came, and the hot sun shone upon the steaming earth, and the spirit of growth crept into the roots, an invalid father—the young planter being still in academic cassock—kept the fences up and vagrant cows from mowing the crop under their sweet breath. Other men often told of like ways of earning not only college bread but also college skittles.

      Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting German lyrics or Plato’s idealism from a wheat-furrow. Report of such advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success, while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances and triumphant exit from such conditions.

      Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sévigné reports herself to have done—and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, “a vary parfit, gentil knight,” her face ruddy with healthy blood, her muscles firm and active—such a girl said one day, in extenuation of her lack of Greek composition, that “her duties had not permitted her to prepare it.”

      “But that is your duty, to prepare it,” I answered. “Are you one of those students who never allow studies to interfere with ‘business’?”

      “No,” she said, quickly; “but let me tell you how it happened. The boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the morning and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up here. In the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly dark. The evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies.”

      What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an Eastern college.

      It is well to reiterate, however, in order to convey no false impression of Hesperus sturdiness and self-reliance, that many, probably a majority, of the students were supported by their natural protectors. But it is clear that there is more self-maintenance—self-reliance in money matters—at the Hesperus University than in any college generally known in the East, and that the methods of obtaining self-succor are at times novel and resultant from an agricultural environment. In evidence that there are students more fortunate—one should rather say more moneyed, for the blessings of money are not always apparent to the inner eye—are the secret societies which flourish among both men and women. The club or society houses, for the furnishing of which carte blanche has been given the individual humanely known as interior decorator, see not infrequently courtesies from one Greek letter society to another, then and there kindly wives of the professors matronizing.2

      An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it disillusions. It takes from the imaginativeness which charms and transfigures the early years of life. In the University of Hesperus one found the immediate fruit of this experience in the desire of the student, expressed before he was thoroughly within the college gates, of obtaining that which would be of immediate practical advantage to himself. He demanded what the Germans call brodstudien, and sometimes very little beyond the knowledge which he could convert into Minnesota wheat or some other iota of the material prosperity which surges from east to west and waxes on every side of our land. How strenuously one had to fight this great impulse! and against what overwhelming odds! It was a reacting of King Canute’s forbiddance to the sea, and, like that famous defeat, it had its humors.

      You could see so plainly that this demon of practicality had been implanted by want, and privation, and a knowledge drunk with the mother’s milk, that the struggle of life on that untested soil was a struggle to live; you could see this so plainly that you often felt constrained to yield to its cry and urgency.

      And the weapons at hand to fight it were so few! Materialism on every hand. And it was plain, also, that here was but an eddy in the wave—that the impulse toward brodstudien was undoubtedly but a groping forward in the great movement of the half-century that has endowed realschulen from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and is perhaps but the beginning of the industrial conquest of the world—in its first endeavors necessarily crippled, over-zealous and impotent of best works.

      Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your conscience the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the idea in academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own sake, of a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity in the intangible world of thought and feeling—desires of souls “hydroptic with a sacred thirst.” To these alone did it behoove us to concede, for through the spirit alone could the “high man” sustainedly lift up his heart—