How lonely the house looks without him! The corded trunks and book-boxes
are there in his empty study. Laura asks leave to come and sleep in
Helen's room: and when she has cried herself to sleep there, the mother
goes softly into Pen's vacant chamber, and kneels down by the bed on
which the moon is shining, and there prays for her boy, as mothers only
know how to plead. He knows that her pure blessings are following him, as
he is carried miles away.
CHAPTER XVIII
Alma Mater
Every man, however brief or inglorious may have been his academical
career, must remember with kindness and tenderness the old university
comrades and days. The young man's life is just beginning: the boy's
leading-strings are cut, and he has all the novel delights and dignities
of freedom. He has no idea of cares yet, or of bad health, or of roguery,
or poverty, or to-morrow's disappointment. The play has not been acted so
often as to make him tired. Though the after drink, as we mechanically go
on repeating it, is stale and bitter, how pure and brilliant was that
first sparkling draught of pleasure!--How the boy rushes at the cup, and
with what a wild eagerness he drains it! But old epicures who are cut off
from the delights of the table, and are restricted to a poached egg and a
glass of water, like to see people with good appetites; and, as the next
best thing to being amused at a pantomime one's-self is to see one's
children enjoy it, I hope there may be no degree of age or experience to
which mortal may attain, when he shall become such a glum philosopher as
not to be pleased by the sight of happy youth.
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