8
UNIVERSITY COURIER.
The Inventor seems to be the only one having near him a maiden to whom he can talk. He is favored beyond the rest, and well he avails himself of his privilege.
Of many and various minds are the students that sit about me. Yonder is one of the motionless gazers into space, and beside him a charmingly ignorant enthusiast. Behind these Phi Delta Theta talks and laughs with his long and sanctimonious neighbor, who always aims to do his best. Near are two Beta Delta Phi brothers, one short, fat, and abounding in words, the other long and thin, comically dry in speech. Not far from these is another of the same order. This one has talent but not energy, though some think him "real nice." His formula is "I don't know," and he is a consistent member of the "sliders."
Beside me sits the Satiric Smiler, sharp fellow he is, and a good foot-ball kicker. He is very fond of going out also, invariably goes to the Opera House at least once a week.
Yonder are Thersites and Socrates side by side, a strange pair they. Socrates seems to be meditating on the infinite, or perhaps thinking that he must congratulate the teacher on the late addition to their respective families.
As for Thersites, who of last year's students does not know him? The supremeness of his impudence, the immensity of his self-conceit, once known is known forever. Have ye forgotten, O ye who read, the hair-cutting subscription, the dictionary testimonial, and the instructions given to the D-n of the N-rm-l D-p-rtm-nt? Such an one as this is a fit representative of the average daily newspaper.
Remembering such things, my thoughts wander on and on, little by little getting farther and farther from the class, until the room fades away, and I fall into a day-dream. I stand under an August noon on a crest of the Flint Hills. On the stony ground the scant grass is dry and brown; the rivulet below scarcely runs in its deep-worn channel. My eyes follow the stream in its eastward course, down the widening valley covered with cornfields and dotted with farm-houses, till they reach the faint blue timber-line of Fall river, twenty miles away. One by one I count the houses, the ninth, that is where—— "Mr. X. Y. Smith," says the Professor, "will you please demonstrate that the sum of the diameters of the calyx and corolla is equal to the altitude of the dorsal fin." Slowly I rise to my feet, endeavoring to collect my scattered thoughts. But hark! the bell strikes out the hour; I am saved; the class is dismissed. X. Y. S.
BY SEA TO PARADISE.
It was nine years ago, and a July morning, when we took the steamer at the Boston wharf, a party of four intent on the Bay of Fundy, and we did not know what beyond. One of the party was an invalid, just ill enough to be peremptorily banished (by the physician), from Massachusetts and from care, but not so ill as to make the office of guardian and companion on the part of the others, more than a pleasant justification of playing.
Mr. Warner had recently published in the Atlantic an enticing article called "Baddeck and That Sort of Thing," detailing in his own charming way a trip through New Brunswick; otherwise it might never have occurred to us that it was possible to do anything so
delightful. Out of the way places are apt to seem unattainable. So it was with a sort of fairy land feeling we found the best place we could on deck for seeing, and established ourselves in it with the happy passiveness that is possible nowhere but on the water.
We found, as every one does, who begins to look at what is near that one need not do more than sail down the harbor to get beauty and joy. Rock and lighthouse, sail and shore, in the clear morning light bespoke a day as free and bright as that foretold by Raphael's Dancing Hours. Before monotony had dulled it, we touched the coast again at Portland and had an hour or two to drive about the streets of that generous restful city by the sea. Then we struck a heavier, more genuine ocean swell, pretty soon the sun went down, and sleep was best of all. Late the next afternoon we discovered the spires of St. Johns in the distance and wondered if it could be we were really in the waters of the Bay of Fundy. It looked so like other bays, the old geographies to the contrary notwithstanding. There was no hint of those mysterious tides that rise seventy feet, of which we had read and dreamed, except that as we came in to the wharf, we looked up at the enormous piles rising like a barricade, or the walls of a canal lock and knew they were there for a purpose.
St. Johns itself is the most provincial of provincial cities. What it is that marks it so plainly as not American, as stamped by English thoughts and customs, it would be hard to tell, but from the drivers of hacks to the ladies shopping in the stores all was as plainly English, as Eastport and Machias the Maine towns we had touched in the morning were American. The band too that happened to play under the hotel windows that night must have been English, probably connected with some fort, for chance cornets heard on the streets of a chance American town have no such sweetness. The sound lingers in the mind yet where the vision of the clumsy building and ugly clothes has almost wholly faded. A few hours gives one enough of St. Johns, and we were ready to take the cars the next morning to go north, following the lovely valley of the Kennebecasis river to Shediac. To be good and happy never seems more possible than under the clear, bright cool skies of Canada or New Brunswick. Something there cools the long fever and delights without exciting. Nothing hurries either, not even the cars. The train drew up like an old-time stage coach beside a station at noon, and conductor, brakemen and passengers stepped off to dine, without shouting or breathlessness, with the most delightful composure, the engine itself seeming perfectly intelligent about it, and to have no thought of motion till dinner was comfortably over.
Shediac, a forlorn little watering place on the Northumberland Straits, is the most remarkable village to select for summer comfort that one can imagine, utterly uninteresting, dingy and dull; the sea itself hardly ocean at all, only a shallow wash of sleepy water. Yet here we saw crowds of people from the towns below seriously making themselves miserable with the idea that it was one of the finest spots on the continent to summer in. For us the Sunday rest was enough, and we were glad to take the steamer for Summerside, the town on Prince Edward's Island directly across the Straits.
It was a rough little voyage short as it was, as all channel passages seem to be, and Summerside for a