of the university without the slightest preparation for the life to come. Commencement! What an ironic word. It should be called bewilderment. I had studied Latin, Greek, and English prose. I was conversant with the principles of mathematics and chemistry, but I was utterly unfamiliar with life and how to live it. I had no specific talents. I was not an artist. I had no capacity for writing. I discovered, in fact, that, far from establishing any of the laws of existence, my education had completely unfitted me for any sort of intercourse with men. I had been much better off had I never seen a campus.
My people were not poor, but their means were moderate. I had brothers and sisters. The necessity of my making a living for myself was borne in upon me by my well-intentioned parents, who had thrown me in the way of forgetting how to make it. In the face of their hope that I would quickly choose some occupation or profession, I found myself completely helpless. I felt no calling for the ministry, the law, or medicine; nor had my education fitted me for any of these pursuits. My father, therefore, a physician in a small town, could give me no assistance. In my extremity I received a letter from one of my college mates, who had inherited from his father a modest but prosperous cloak and suit business. He, too, was bitterly despondent, and felt himself utterly incapable of undertaking the management of the firm. It had oc-
