104

UNDER THE STARS.

noyed and shamed him. He lay in bed till late, was absent from lecture, and got up to an unrelished breakfast, at which he was disturbed by the entrance of Bruce, to congratulate him on his winnings of the evening before.

While Bruce was talking to him, Lillyston also strolled in, on his way from lecture, to ask what had kept Kennedy away. He was surprised to see the pale and weary look on his face, and, catching sight of Bruce seated in the arm-chair by the fire, he merely made some commonplace remarks, and left the room. But he met Julian in the court, and told him that Kennedy didn't seem to be well.

"I'm not surprised," said Julian; "he supped with Brogten, and then went to play cards with Bruce, and I hear that Bruce's card parties are not very steady proceedings."

"Can't we manage to keep him out of that set, Julian? it will be the ruin of his reading."

“Ay, and worse, Hugh. But what can one say? It will hardly do to read homilies to one's fellow-undergraduates."

"You might at least give him a hint.”

"I will. I suppose he'll come and do some Euripides to-night."

He did come, and when they had read some three hundred lines, and the rest were separating, he proposed to Julian a turn in the great court.

The stars were crowding in their bright myriads, and the clear silvery moonlight bathed the court, except where the hall and chapel flung fantastic and mysterious shadows across the green smooth-mown

PRESENTIMENTS.

105

lawns of the quadrangle. The soft light, the cool exhilarating night air were provocative of thought, and they walked up and down for a time in silence.

Many thoughts were evidently working in Kennedy's mind, and they did not all seem to be bright or beautiful as the thoughts of youth should be. Julian's brain was busy, too; and as they paced up and down, arm and arm, the many-colored images of hope and fancy were flitting thick and fast across his vision. He was thinking of his own future and of Kennedy's, whom he was beginning to love as a brother, and for whose moral weakness he sometimes feared.

"Julian," said Kennedy, suddenly breaking the silence; "were you ever seized by an uncontrollable, unaccountable, irresistible presentiment of coming evil, -a feeling as if a sudden gulf of blackness and horror yawned before you-a dreadful something haunting you, you knew not what, but only knew that it was there?"

"I have had presentiments, certainly; though hardly of the kind you describe."

"Well, Julian, I have such a presentiment now, overshadowing me with the sense of guilt, of which I was never guilty; as though it were the shadow of some crime committed in a previous state of existence, forgotten yet unforgotten, incurred yet unavenged."

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'Probably the mere result of a headache this morning, and the night air now," said Julian, smiling at the energetic description, yet pained by the intensity of Kennedy's tone of voice.

"Hush, Julian! I hate all that stupid materialism. Depend upon it, some evil thing is over me. I wonder whether crimes of the future can throw their crimson shadow back over the past. My life, thank God, has been an innocent one, yet now I feel like the guiltiest thing alive."

"One oughtn't to yield to such feelings, or to be the victim of a heated imagination, Kennedy. In my own case at least, half the feelings I have fancied to be presentiments have turned out false in the endpresentiments, I mean, which have been suggested, as perhaps this has, by passing circumstances."

"God grant this may be false!" said Kennedy; "but something makes me feel uneasy."

"It will be a lying prophet, if you so determine, Kennedy. The only enemy who has real power to hurt us is ourselves. Why should you be agitated by an idle forecast of uncertain calamity? Be brave, and honest, and pure, and God will be with you. Don't be surprised," continued Julian, "if you've heard me say the same words before; they were my father's dying bequest to his eldest son."

"Be brave, and honest, and pure- repeated Kennedy; "yes, you must be right, Julian. Look, what a glorious sky, and what numberless 'patines of bright gold!'"

Julian looked up, and at that moment a meteor shot across the heaven, plunging as though from the galaxy into the darkness, and, after the white and dazzling luster of the trail had disappeared, seeming to leave behind the glory of it a deeper gloom. It gave too true a type of many a young man's destiny.

Kennedy said nothing, but although it is not the Camford custom to shake hands, he shook Julian's hand that night with one of those warm and loving grasps, which are not soon forgotten. And each walked slowly back to his own room.

THE banks of "silvery-winding Iscam" were thronged with men; between the hours of two and four o'clock the sculls were to be tried for, and some eight hundred of the thousand undergraduates poured out of their colleges by twos and threes to watch the result from the banks on each side.

The first and second guns had been fired, and the scullers in their boats, each some ten yards apart from the other, are anxiously waiting the firing of the third, which is the signal for starting. That strong splendid-looking young man, whose arms are bared to the shoulder, and "the muscles all aripple on his back," is almost quivering with anxious expectation. The very instant the sound of the gun reaches his ear, those oar-blades will flash like lightning into the water, and "smite the sounding furrows" with marvelous regularity and speed. He is the favorite, and there are some heavy bets on his success; Bruce and Brogten and Lord Fitzurse will be richer or poorer by some