ten o'clock
`` I once wished to be a writer , sir , '' I replied tremulously , but refrained from telling him of my father 's opinion of the profession . Ambition -- a purer ambition than I had known for years -- leaped within me at his words . He , Alonzo Cheyne , had detected in me the Promethean fire ! I sat there until ten o'clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne , a human Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room . Nor had I suspected one in whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates -LRB- of my sort -RRB- seemed so ingrained , of such idealism . He did not pour it out in preaching ; delicately , unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed to present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the university held by me and my intimate associates . After I had left him I walked the quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another Harvard , and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of the vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens , the spirit of Harvard responding to the spirit of the Republic -- to the call of Lincoln , who voiced it .