And it
was a Professor Langworth's grammar and exercise book that we used as a
text-book. Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of
Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.
And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in
Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education
was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big
concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be
less appallingly machine-like.
The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the
University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar's
office) overwhelmed me with their number. And I fled. With the exception
of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no
longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode
a freight further to Laurel.
* * * * *
In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards
at Laurel....
I enquired my way to the university.
"Up on the hill."
I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance.
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