Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/42

 again to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.

IV

Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture, influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished, because so many of its students came from the southern states. It declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed foundation.

One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several times a day passed by my grandfather's home on his way to and from his classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the distinguished