Explore "An Edinburgh Eleven" by James Matthew Barrie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When Chrystal came to Edinburgh, he rooted up the humors of the class-room as a dentist draws teeth. Souls were sold for keys that could be carried in the waistcoat pocket. Ambition fell from heights, and lay with its eye on a certificate. By night was a rush of ghosts, shrieking for passes. Horse-play fled before the Differential Calculus in spectacles.
I had Chrystal's first year, and recall the gloomy student sitting before me who hacked "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" into a desk that may have confined Carlyle. It took him a session, and he was digging his own grave, for he never got through; but it was something to hold by, something he felt sure of. All else was spiders' webs in chalk.