Very beautiful was the long vista¹ of the elm-arched street. So irresistibly² did it woo the eye to linger among its gray columns and green arches, or wander adown its fair, temple-like perspective to the hazy³ vanishing point, that the wayfarer⁴ might easily forget to observe what sort of dwellings⁵ were ranged along its sides. Nor did they seek to force themselves upon his notice. They were all plain, substantial structures, with no obtrusive⁶ marks of ostentation⁷ or of meanness about them; and they all stood a little back from the street, leaving room for a trim grass-plot, or a thicket⁸ of flowering shrubs⁹, between them and the passer-by. They would impress him, collectively, as genuine, well-to-do homes, free alike from the struggles of poverty and the temptations of wealth, without troubling him to recognize them individually, or diverting his gaze from the over-arching elms that were so much better worth his looking at.

Such, at least, would be the fact, until he came to a certain corner; where a large square structure of stuccoed brick, coming boldly forward to the pavement, and planting its heavy steps thereon, would be sure to arrest his glance, and, perhaps, faintly stir his curiosity. It was too large for a private building, and too unpretending for a public one,—what was it? If he had put the inquiry¹⁰ into audible words, he would have been told that it was the Medical College. And if his interlocutor had chanced to be a white-haired, genial-faced old man, long ago flung aside from the stream of active life, and, consequently, with time on his hands for a little chat with a stranger,—he would, doubtless, have woven into his answer the popular

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