A few weeks later,
after he had gone into the country to teach school for the winter, he
received word that he had been suspended. Indignant at what he
considered an injustice to his character and scholarship, he left
Bowdoin forever: nor did he perhaps lose much by this. The philosophical
studies of the senior year could be mastered as easily by a mind like
Wasson's without an instructor as with one. He never studied for rank
and cared little or nothing for college honors or degrees.
There is no good art without a sense of delicacy; and this mental
delicacy is usually matched by some kind of physical sensitiveness.
Artists are, according to the vulgar phrase, more thin-skinned than
other people. Both at Bowdoin College, and afterwards while at the
divinity-school, Wasson worked hard in summer and taught school in
winter so as to help in defraying the expense of his education. In this
mode of life he encountered many hardships that were too severe for him.
I notice among my own classmates that very few of those who lived in
this manner reached the age of thirty-five. The food which Wasson
encountered during his winter peregrinations was anything but what human
beings are intended to eat. On one occasion he returned from his school
to dine as usual in a cold room, and found himself provided there with
the skeleton of a chicken, two large beets, a pie made of preserved
barberries, and biscuits which pulled out when separated, like a
telescope.
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