MY SPIRIT CHUM.

THERE must have been something more than the wine-crackers at the bottom of it all, though I shall always maintain that they were very strong. To tell the truth, the Goody did say something the next morning about "thim nasty empty bottles" - "nasty" to her, I fear, because they were empty - and the broken glass trodden into the carpet. And as I think the matter over, I remember that Jones said something about its not being right to allow somebody to go to bed alone; that somebody chased Jones around the room, and finally threw a boot at his head as he disappeared through the door. All this is a little misty; but what followed is much clearer. I remember I sank into an arm-chair by the fire with no definite purpose in mind, but how long I sat thus I have no idea, - it might have been hours or minutes. Without my hearing any previous step in the hall the door opened, and I felt that some one entered. I thought it was Jones come back with more of his foolish, indefinite speeches, and was preparing to read him a short lecture on the besetting sin of intemperance, with pointed allusions, and then treat him to the other boot, when the person came full into the firelight, and seated himself quietly opposite me.

He was a man bent and wrinkled by age, dressed in cocked-hat and knee-breeches, with his hair powdered and done up in a queue. He looked like some Rip Van Winkle who might have graduated any time early in the last century, and have been sleeping quietly from that time, only to wake then and trouble me.

Without any questions from me he began telling story after story, holding me spell-bound, as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding-guest "with his glittering eye." In fact, this eye is all I can distinctly remember about him, for his body seemed ghost-like and unreal enough. It was like the eye of any old man, weak and watery, while he described my Hollis room as he knew it once with its sanded floor and two wooden chairs; or while he pictured the Yard with its five buildings, deserted but for an occasional boy in a long, bag-tailed black coat, three-cornered hat, and knee-breeches, running from room to room; or the President's cows feeding in the long grass and drinking from the pool of water that gathered where University now stands.

But when he told some tale of wild pranks after a punch, when the royal upper-classmen had been served from a huge bowl by trembling Freshmen, their fags, dragged from warm beds to grace their lords' festivities, his eye sparkled and blazed with a youthful fire, and he seemed a boy again. With what glee did he tell of Harvard's one fire-engine, first at all fires (when perfectly convenient), drawn by a crowd of yelling students, and whose cold streams, when fires were less frequent and the student mind needed gentle relaxation, were often turned upon the windows of obnoxious tutors.

He talked proudly of the Harvard Washington Corps and the Navy, whose flags are long since food for moths, and whose very names are meaningless to us. For aught I know, he might have been an officer in one of these, and led his troop down from their armory in the top of Hollis, or presided at the clam-chowder served up on the annual cruise of the other. He might have been (though no one would have guessed it from his bent body and trembling hands as he sat there in the dying firelight) leader of the trembling crowd of Freshmen on the Delta on one of the first nights of the year, and given "warning," and followed the spinning ball right among the ranks of the Sophomores, coming out victorious, though with torn clothes and covered with scratches. I remember he seemed to impart some of his fire to me, for a patriotic thrill passed through me as he told of the meeting held by Adams, Otis, Hancock, and others in little Holden just before the Revolution, or how, a few months later, the College was removed to Concord, and Continental soldiers slung their hammocks in old Massachusetts.

Then he suddenly started in another vein, and chilled my blood by the legend of Wiswall's Den (the College House of to-day stands nearly upon its site), where the pale "dig" was occasionally driven terrified from his books as the clock on Massachusetts struck midnight, and he heard the scuffling feet and ghostly shrieks of Mrs. Wiswall No. I, who disappeared so mysteriously, to be suddenly replaced by Mrs. Wiswall No. 2, thereby throwing a dark cloud of suspicion over the respectable character of Mr. Wiswall. He filled my soul with envy as he told of his Commons in Harvard Hall during those palmy days - alas! now gone by - when the bread of the College baker was renowned throughout all Cambridge; and I mournfully thought of my Commons, where the bread has only a local fame, and is not eagerly sought after. Thus he went on as if he would never stop, telling more stories and anecdotes than I can recall.

Among other things, he mentioned that he was the first occupant of my room (the number is purposely suppressed), and while he was telling with great pride of once stealing a fat turkey, the glory of Cambridge poultry-yards, and roasting it in the very fireplace by which we were sitting, I had fully made up my mind to break my long silence and ask him if he knew anything about Eliot's Indian College or Harvard's only Indian graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck Indus, when the door suddenly opened, and, on looking around, I discovered that it was broad daylight, that the old man had vanished, and that the new-comer was Jones. Yes, Jones, back with a racking headache, to beg for the homoeopathic remedy of "a hair of the dog that bit him." I told him the whole story without reserve, and asked his opinion. "Well," said he, gazing reflectively into the fire, "it seems that the old man has been living in the room somewhere for more than a hundred years, and if he don't trouble you, I should say you might go on chumming with him; but if this sort of thing, you know, brings on his visits, you can leave off -" Here he stopped, for I was feeling instinctively for the other boot.

NOTE.- The few anachronisms here may be accounted for by considering either the narrator's condition, the uncertainty of the year in which the old man graduated, or possibly that there was no old man at all. - EDS.