The Mayor of Warwick | Page 2

capable hand that
grasped his walking-stick as if it were a weapon, would reveal the type
claimed by America as peculiarly her own. It was evident that he
possessed energy and endurance, if not the power of the athlete. His
expression was intellectual, and shrewd almost to hardness; yet
somewhere in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth there lurked a
suggestion of sweetness and of ideality, that gave the whole personality
a claim to more than passing interest and regard.
This curious blending of opposite traits, of shrewdness and of ideality,
was illustrated by his thoughts as he strode along, making no more of
the hill than he would have made of level ground. Nothing escaped his
eye or failed of its impression upon his mind. Fresh from the teeming
life of a large university, he noted the absence of students from the
steps of the fraternity houses on his right, though it lacked but three
days of the opening of the college. Already his own university had felt
the first wave of the incoming class, a class that would doubtless
contain four times as many students as the total membership of St.
George's Hall. Instinctively he searched his mind for an explanation of
this lack of growth in an institution that numbered nearly one hundred

years of life. What was the defect? Where was the remedy? He jumped
at once to the conclusion that both were discoverable, and dimly
foresaw that the discovery might be his own.
He approached the scene where he was himself to be on trial in the
spirit of one who questioned, not his fitness for the place he was to
occupy, for of that he had no shadow of doubt, but the fitness of the
place for him. If he saw promotion, perhaps the presidency, within his
grasp, he might deem it worth his while to stay; if not, his professorship
should be a stepping-stone to something better. With the history, the
traditions, and the ideals of the Hall he was but slightly acquainted; in
fact, the institution existed for him at present only in its relation to
himself and his possible future.
And yet, beneath these thoughts of self ran a current of feeling or
impressions which never rose high enough in his consciousness to win
definite recognition. If his first view of the college was depressing
because of the failure of fruition its appearance suggested, he was not
utterly unappreciative of the pictorial effect: the splendid lines of
dignity and beauty; the soft brown colour of the stone, relieved by the
lighter tone of lintel and window-frame and sill; the dark green of the
ivy; the great, black shadow of the tower on the slated roof where every
jutting dormer window threw its lesser shade; the wide sky beyond, of
a blueness which an artist would have wished to paint.
From the meadow below the plateau came the tinkle of cow-bells,
musical in the distance; and this sound, combined with the note of a
bird and the voices of children from an unseen garden, produced an
Arcadian atmosphere which even the harsh gong of the returning
electric car could not dispel.
As he climbed higher, the houses fell away, disclosing the bare hilltop
over which the road seemed to dip down and disappear; and though he
knew it could not be so, he was half expectant of the sea when he
should have lifted his head above the verge. Instead, he saw a wide and
shallow valley, rich in the varied products of the autumn, with here and
there a bare, reaped field, with many a white farmhouse and barn of red
or grey, till his eye followed the road to the western hill line and noted

a patch of small, white objects which might be a group of boulders left
by a prehistoric glacier, or the houses of a distant town.
The view on the east, when he turned and faced in the direction from
which he had come, was one of greater interest and of no less beauty.
In the immediate foreground the city of Warwick, in which he had
passed the previous night, thrust its smoking factory chimneys, its
spires and towers, above the shining roofs and lofty elms. But the final
element of charm was found in a broad and sinuous river, blue as the
reflected sky, which flowed past the city's wharves, under a fine stone
bridge, and on through woodland and ploughed land to the sea. Small
wonder that he now forgot for a moment his own ambitions and plans,
and thought only that St. George's Hall lifted its head within an earthly
paradise!
The building, seen from the end, presented the same extraordinary
change that is to be noted when a long ocean steamship