A RETURN TO HANOVER

There are a good many old saws to the effect that familiarity breeds contempt, but it is probable that they err on the side of exaggeration. It is not so much contempt which results from familiarity as something which can better be characterized as indifference. Probably this is a fundamental psychological fact; and it is all the more tribute to college life in general, and to Dartmouth in particular, that in this particular case the rule does not apply. Those who know Hanover best are usually those who enjoy it most, and this is even true of the four years of undergraduate life. But it is nevertheless the case that Dartmouth, and presumably other colleges, have one great drawback. You cannot fully enjoy them while you are a part of them. They are too close to you. You have no perspective, and the result is that you become blind to a good many charming aspects which they wear. So it is only those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to come back to Hanover now and then who fully appreciate just how many delightful features, the life there presents.

able therapeutic quality, which may be hard to define but which must nevertheless be felt by any visitor. To return to Hanover as I did after an absence of ten years is to perceive the existence of beauties unsuspected till that time, to discover a friendliness in the atmosphere and a charm in the perpetual associations of a very definite and valuable

Of course it is only possible to see these things from a personal point of view. I shall always remember very vividly a certain trip to Hanover during the latter part of February with Mrs. Williams, and with our two boys serving in a general way the part of an interpretative chorus, opening our eyes when they needed opening, making clear to us the true inwardness of our own reactions, and incidentally setting us now and then very definitely in our place as oldsters who can only look back and whose pleasure must therefore be always tinged with sadness as compared with that exuberant anticipation which is the fair portion c*f those years when one looks forward to college and need not look beyond at all.

Even the trip by train from Boston had about it something which differentiated it from other railroad journeys. Before half the distance was done, the landscape to be seen from the car windows began to assume familiar and suggestive contours. The day was bright and cold and perfectly clear, yet the sun was sufficiently warm so that when we stopped at a station we could see water dripping from the snow-laden eaves, and pools of water blackening the boards of the platforms. Even the cinders and smoke were less offensive when they came to us chilled by their passage through the cold air; and the smooth surface of the white clad river, broken here and there by black blotches where swifter water had prevented ice from forming, had something about it which invited an adventurous foot.

As the towns became smaller, the names of the stations began to be familiar, and even before we came to Lebanon the boys themselves had caught the infection of our own eagerness, and we had all piled into coats and overshoes twenty minute before we reached the June.

The ride by train from the Junction to Hanover, after a change of cars there, might almost have been calculated for the very purpose of taking the joy out of life; but it was possible to avoid this, and we took one of the automobiles with snow shovels strapped to the tire-carrier at the back, and thus covered the remainder of the way, plunging through the uneven roads, crawling to one side when it became necessary to let other cars pass, feeling communicated to our bodies through the tires and the frame of the car that curious, firm and exhilarating resilience characteristic and packed snow which makes it possible to walk on such a surface almost tirelessly. After we had passed the woods about Wilder, we began to see the parallel marks of skis on the white breasts of the low and friendly hills, and these marks became more frequent, till in the valley below the village they were an interlacing network of inviting trails. The boys had skis at home, but their only opportunity to use them had been in backyards where a slide of twenty feet was an event. The testimony on the hillsides confirmed our promise that they should go skiing here, and the tumult of their plans, and the glamor of their boasts as to what they would do began for the first time to fill Mrs. Williams and myself with some misgivings as to our ability to keep pace with them.

To alight at the Inn, to experience the pleasant surprise attendant upon discovering how low a fee was charged for this ride from the June., and to see about the Campus the familiar fronts of the buildings which make the place seem unchanged, accentuated the pleasant feeling of coming home.

I first came to Hanover on the midnight train in the fall of 1906, and I remember walking up the hill from the station carrying my suitcase, knowing nobody in town, and not even sure where I would sleep that night. Lon Gove, I believe, was in charge of the desk at the Inn when I applied there, hopefully enough, for accommodations. He told me every room was full, and I slept that night, or what remained of that night, on a seat in the writing room, a seat which abutted against the wall at one end, and at the other had an unnecessarily high arm; and which was, over all, only about four and one-half feet long, while I was myself thirty percent longer.

Even before we went up-stairs to our rooms, on this later occasion, I took the boys in to see that seat which will always be one of my most vivid memories of Hanover. Bud said "Gee," and Chuck said "Gosh," and they both looked at me with a measuring eye, as though estimating just how much of a feat it had been for me to pass even the tagend of a night within such bounds.

When we turned I came face to face with Andy Scarlett, and his smile was exactly as it had been that night in our Freshman year when he scattered parched corn along the length of the corridor in Wheeler Hall for Fat Dillingham to discover, to his vociferous sorrow, when a little later as the loser in a game of strip poker, he had to run the long gauntlet of the hall in that condition to be expected of one who is unlucky at this particular pastime.

After dinner we sent the boys to bed, and then crossed the street to the movies, and although there were no moving pictures in Hanover in 1906, the fellows who jeered at the more blatant absurdities of the film displayed this night spoke with the same voices as those of fifteen years before. Thus there was no sense of strangeness in discovering movies in Hanover. They had already assumed that atmosphere of venerable respectability which made it easy to believe that they had always been here. I suppose this is a characteristic of every new thing in Hanover life, that it ceases to be a new thing by being added on to other things which are old and very familiar. To be conscious of this fact was to feel very definitely the eternal character of the College. I was reading the other night something about the Dartmouth College case in which, if my memory is accurate, John Marshall uttered that definition of a corporation as both immortal and individual. When he did so, he had Dartmouth College in mind, and there has always seemed to be a peculiar truth in this characterization, and a peculiar satisfaction in feeling that you are, for all the transient character of your own life, a unit in that immortal and individual corporate existence, a part of that eternal flowing stream. It is perhaps easy to forget this when you are away from Hanover, but to return is to experience in full and fuller measure the comforting certainty again.

When we were presently abed I lay a long time awake, while from the Campus through this still and friendly cold of the night there came the occasional sound of the whistle of some solitary man returning to his room, the snow squeaking under his slogging feet, or the murmur of the voices of two or three fellows in conversation, decreasing as they drew away towards the Chapel, lost at last in the embracing night while the sounds of their feet were still audible. And I heard once or twice someone shout a hail or a farewell to his fellow, and I caught the far blare of a saxophone from some fraternity house up toward the hospital. And now and then the door of College Hall slammed echoingly, and I could hear the steps of the man who had come out as he crossed the wide veranda and descended the steps, and the squeaking note of the packed snow as he hurried on his way.

In the morning, the first clang of the Chapel bell awoke me. As a Freshman I lived in Wheeler Hall, and that first note was my rising gong, and it was easily possible in the seven minutes intervening between the first stroke and the final double peal of the tolling bell, for me to get into my clothes and get to Chapel. But to do that it had been necessary to awaken with no preparatory rubbing of the eyes or indolent yawns. So this morning I awoke and sat up in bed. I was on the point of leaping to the floor when memory came back to me, realization of the fact I could lie still and let the damned bells ring. So I lay down again, and relaxed luxuriously; and the second bell added its clamor to the first, and their interweaving sounds had about them a fierce and insistent and intoxicating summons. And when the third struck in, it seemed impossible that any man could sleep through such a din. It seemed impossible that any man could want to sleep through it. There was something joyful about it, something exuberant and youthful, full of an avid appetite for life, full of invitation. The spell which the bells laid upon me became almost intolerable, and I was on the point of changing my mind and getting up after all. I did go so far as to get out of bed and go to the window and stand there, watching the long black lines of men crossing the Campus paths towards the Chapel and there converging so that these many streams flowed into one and this one disappeared at last into the distant portico. But while I still stood at the window, the shouting clamor of the three bells ended, and the tolling began; and immediately I felt a sense of anti-climax, as though my emotions had been worked to a fever pitch only to discover in the end that there was nothing to be excited about after all. Felt a sense of disappointment, of having been cheated. These bells had summoned all within their hearing with such riotous shouts of promise and invitation to a new and glorious day, only to descend so abruptly into a melancholy tolling, as though to say:

"Well you're all up, and we really thought there was something exciting in the air, but it's only another day after all."

I went back to bed, and with that final decisive double stroke of the great clapper, my eyes closed; and almost before the reverberations of the bell had ceased vibrating through the still morning air, I was asleep again.

If it had not been for the boys, we might well enough have slept till noon, but that was in their opinion a wholly fruitless way to spend the morning, and we presently found ourselves dragged out of bed, and so came down-stairs to breakfast. And afterwards on the Inn veranda selected skis, and with them across our shoulders went down below the village where the hills are not too long nor too severe, and where it was possible to give the boys some paternal instruction.

I entered upon this business confidently enough, lit is quite true that when I was in college, to go skiing meant simply to walk out to a convenient hill, stick your toes through the loops, slide down the hill, keep your feet if you could, pick up your skis, climb to the top again, and repeat till satisfied. This much at least I supposed I could safely show the boys, and I expected to see them tumble as extravagantly in the soft snow as I had myself been used to do. They were a disappointment to me. They refused to fall; or when they did fall it was in a manner perfectly innocuous. They had at first been humble enough and willing to learn, but before we had been there more than a few minutes, they had reached the point of patronizing Mrs. Williams' efforts; and when she successfully accomplished the first hill they both said in tones calculated to be reassuring: "Pretty good, Mother. Pretty good."

I felt a certain chilly foreboding, felt a curious certainty that before the day was done they would even so be patronizing me. But I managed to avert this consummation all morning; and we went back to the Inn for dinner, all of us warm and tingling, and the older of us feeling quite definitely that we had had enough for a little while.

After dinner we suggested this to the boys, but they had no notion of submitting to such a curtailment of their activities, so while Mrs. Williams stayed behind, I set out with them once more. But I had learned to be wary, so I chose a route which I was sure was well within my powers, and at the first opportunity suggested that we abandon the hills and strike a trail which ran from the Junction road through a winding valley to strike the Lebanon road below the gym. I calculated on this being hard work for them, thought it might somewhat dampen their enthusiasm; and in this I was correct. Their skis did not fit them properly; they were forever losing one or the other; and even if il went slowly, what was slow for me was fast for them. They became weary and dejected, and from this I was so unwary as to acquire a false confidence. I began to exult in my apparent victory, and to emphasize it by urging them to new efforts.

Disaster overtook me at a point within a hundred yards of the road that was our destination. Here, on the right-hand side of the valley we were following, boys had heaped a pile of snow at the top of a steep little pitch, and thus constructed a low jump with a landing on the almost perpendicular slope below. I suggested in my arrogance that the boys try this jump. The snow was deep. There was no likelihood that they would suffer anything worse than a tumble. Bud was frankly unwilling to undertake the adventure, and while I tried to hearten him, Chuck, who is apt to be the more silent of the two, listened with a thoughtful attention. I told them how easy it was, and I assured them that even though they fell, they would suffer no harm, and I elaborated upon this theme, confidently enough, until Chuck struck me basely in the rear by suggesting: "Why don't you do it, Daddy, and show us how?"

I had gone too far to withdraw. There was no escape for me in any quarter, and that little jump which had seemed so innocent when I was urging them to attempt it, grew before my very eyes till it was as impressive as that appalling structure beyond the golf links. As between the two I think I might have even chosen the other. There the end would at least be decisive and immediate. Here I was not likely to be killed, was much more likely to be maimed and to drag out a miserable existence for years. I tried explaining that my skis did not fit me, that the jump was too short for me to bother with, that they would never learn by seeing others do what they should do themselves. But they combined against me and overpowered me with my own arguments; pointed out that my skis fitted better than theirs did, and that what was easy for them would be less than an incident for me.

Matters reached a point where it was better to die bravely than to confess my own fears, so I climbed to the run above the jump, and without giving myself time to draw back, set my skis in line and let go. I remember—will I ever forget —-that moment immediately before I struck the take-off, that moment when I saw the two boys twenty or thirty feet below me, watching with wide eyes, a cool curiosity in their countenances as though they were already estimating how many pieces there would be left for them to carry home. And my skis struck the take-off and spurned it beneath them, and I was in the air.

It was at this moment that I decided not to make the jump after all, let the boys think what they would. It was better to be despised than to be dead. But the only effect of my decision was to make both of my skis slip sidewise and in opposite directions, and I saw them rise in the air in front of me and cross at an appalling angle. Then I was fathoms deep in soft snow, bruised in a dozen places, and with snow packed firmly inside my collar, up my sleeves, and under my belt. By the time I fought my way to the surface, I had realized that I was not defunct, so I stuck my head out of the drift and struck the snow off my face and laughed a loud and boisterous laugh. "There you are," I cried.

It was Chuck who delivered the verdict: "Pretty good, Daddy," he said, in a tone full of patronage. And I humbly glathered up my shattered skis, and led the way to the road, and we trudged back to the Inn while the two boys discussed with some merriment the appearance which I had presented at various stages of the enterprise.

Mrs. Williams and I were united that evening in putting them to bed very promptly after supper.

I believe we saw that evening the annual musical show, and this experience alone of those which one encounters in Hanover is calculated to make an alumnus feel his age. Afterwards we walked back across the Campus to the Inn, strolling indolently, our coats open, breathing deeply the exhilarating air, and when we reached the Inn, Mrs. Williams remarked: "It must be quite warm tonight."

We looked at the thermometer on the pillar of one side of the entrance and found that it registered ten below zero, so we knew that the thermometer was wrong.

The next day—it was chinning season —we were able to enlist the services of two Freshmen as chaperons, nurses, and guardians for the boys; and we saw them off with a relieved sigh at the thought that someone else would have to take them skiing now. I cannot be sure as to this, but it is my impression that one of the Freshmen spent that night in the hospital, and that the other returned on crutches.

We ourselves went sedately for a walk, chose to go afoot along the ski trail through the Vale of Tempe. And on the outward journey we had easy going, and went blithely, and the loveliness of the winding path laid a spell upon us so that we talked little, were content to submit to the embraces of the healing silence all about. But when we came to return, the temperature had risen; the sun had warmed the snow, and we began to break through the trail and to flounder knee deep in snow at almost every step. Thus progress was difficult, and weariness increased to a point that was for me distressing and must have been for Mrs. Williams torment.

It is a testimony to the influence of Hanover that neither of us particularly resented the experience. There is something about the place which strengthens the soul. (I well remember the occasion at our tenth reunion, when half a dozen of us started out one early morning to walk from Wheeler Hall up to the Tower. One exquisite and charming young woman whose very aspect testified at once to an outward daintiness and to an inner aestheticism, wore low suede pumps 'and gray silk hose of an attractive shade. The dew lay heavy that morning, and none of us particularly minded. But she—and she had been in Hanover only two days—expressed her disapproval of its effect upon her pumps and her hosiery by the fervent remark:

"Hell's bells, this grass is wet!"

There is something about a visit to Hanover which appears to have the same effect as seeing "What Price Glory!"

There used to be a tradition that the place breeds strong men with hair on their chests. Certainly it is true that those who come back here accept discomforts joyfully. I remember another occasion in February when four of us undertook to walk down the Vale. The snow was deep and soft, and a thaw was in progress. We found ourselves on the wrong side of the brook, and our footway narrowed until on our right hand lay the brook itself and on the left the steep bank, almost impossible to climb when it is heavily covered with snow, behind Harry Wellman's house. At this critical moment we discovered a fallen tree which might serve as a bridge, and we made our way to it, and undertook to cross thereby. There was snow on the tree, and beneath this snow a sheathing of ice. The first adventurer made the crossing safely, straddling the tree as though he rode a horse; but she whose turn came next was not appareled for such an enterprise. She undertook to lie cross-wise of the log and hitch herself ungracefully from left to right until she reached the other side of the brook. But before she was halfway across, she began, as the saying is, to lose altitude; and the slippery ice betrayed her, and presently she was hanging by her elbows directly above the brook itself, where it was quite certain the rotten ice would not support her weight. All passed so quickly that before any effective help could come to her, she was forced to loose her hold; and she went into the brook to her knees, and scrambled out again, and found in the whole incident only food 'for hilarity which, when we remember it, still possesses us all.

We went that day, I remember, to Harry Wellman's and had tea before hi? great fire; and a similar experience marked the last evening of our stay in Hanover on the occasion when we took the boys. They had come home happily exhausted, but Harry had invited us to dinner and had invited them, so, we dined at his table; and afterwards the boys fell peacefully asleep upon the couch in the living-room while we sat about the fire till the sleigh came to take us back to the Inn. And Bud could not even be awakened for that ride through the night.

We had another sleigh the next day to Lebanon where we took the train for home, and we followed the hill road and had that sense of elevation, of altitude, and of the attendant exhilaration which is so much a part of the atmosphere of Hanover. And now that the rigors of our three days there were over, we were all conscious of that therapeutic influence which the place exerts upon every visitor.

Until a man has been out of college ten or fifteen yeais and has thus come back to the familiar scenes, he has not begun to discover all that Dartmouth has to give him. It is a very definite evidence of this fact that no one ever leaves Hanover after such a stay without planning, perhaps in vain, but

planning nevertheless, when he will come Sagain.

You may be lucky enough to live in these surroundings, but I believe that to savor them to the full you will be wise to come away for a while so that you can learn the joy of going back again.

The Editor asked Mr. Williams to write a story of his impressions on the occasion of one of his many winter visits to Hanover. The delightful account here printed came in the form of a letter to the Editor.