"I thought you had told me all about yourself long ago," I said. "How is it that you have kept so mum about this experience? I should fancy it must have been a decidedly odd one."

"It was a very odd one," replied Hammond,—"the strangest passage, on the whole, I think, in my life. I have never spoken of it, because it is one of those emotional experiences which no man likes to relate unless he is sure of being understood. To tell it to most men would be casting pearls before swine. I have always meant to tell you when a suitable opportunity came up."

"You know," he said, when I had signified my eagerness to hear, "that I graduated at Leroy College. It was a little one-horse institution, but blue as a whetstone in its orthodoxy; and with my father, who was a clergyman of a very strait sect and staid views, that fact covered a multitude of shortcomings. I was nineteen when I entered, and consequently twenty when, at. . . Read More