It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this
probation. So far as I could see, everything went on as if I were
there, or had never been there. I could not even see the place where
I had dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I heard my name, but I
must say that four weeks was quite long enough to stay in a world
that had pretty much forgotten me. There is no great satisfaction in
being dragged up to light now and then, like an old letter. The case
was somewhat different with the people with whom I had boarded. They
were relations of mine, and I often saw them weep, and they talked of
me a good deal at twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest
one, Carrie, who was handsomer than any one I knew, and not much
older than I. I never used to imagine that she cared particularly
for me, nor would she have done so, if I had lived, but death brought
with it a sort of sentimental regret, which, with the help of a
daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a little passion. I spent most
of my time there, for it was more congenial than the college.

But time hastened. The last sand of probation leaked out of the
glass. One day, while Carrie played (for me, though she knew it not)
one of Mendelssohn's "songs without words," I suddenly, yet gently,
without self-effort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the
air, rose higher, higher, by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet
inconceivably rapid motion. The ecstasy of that triumphant flight!
Groves, trees, houses, the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away
beneath me. Upward mounting, as on angels' wings, with no effort,
till the earth hung beneath me a round black ball swinging, remote,
in the universal ether. Upward mounting, till the earth, no longer
bathed in the sun's rays, went out to my sight, disappeared in the
blank. Constellations, before seen from afar, I sailed among.