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Title: The Diary of a Freshman

Creator: Charles Macomb Flandrau

Release date: February 12, 2014 [eBook #44888]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIARY OF
A FRESHMAN ***

THE DIARY
of a FRESHMAN

By
CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU
Author of "Harvard Episodes"

NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY
MDCCCCI

Copyright, 1900, by

The Curtis Publishing Co.
Copyright, 1901, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

University Press
John Wilson and Son

Cambridge, U.S.A.

TO THE
"For Ever Panting and For Ever Young."

Courteous acknowledgment is here
made to the Saturday Evening
Post, Philadelphia, in which these
papers first saw the light.

THE
DIARY of a FRESHMAN

I

Mamma left for home this afternoon. As I want to be perfectly truthful in
my diary, I suppose I must confess that before she actually went away I
sometimes thought I should be rather relieved when she was no longer here.
Mamma has a fixed idea that I came to college for the express purpose of
getting my feet wet by day, and sleeping in a draught by night. She began
the furnishing of my rooms by investing in a pair of rubber boots,—the kind
you tie around your waist with a string. The clerk in the shop asked her if I
was fond of trout-fishing, and she explained to him that I had always lived
in the West where the climate was dry, and that she did n't know how I
would stand the dampness of the seacoast. Mamma thought the clerk was so

interested in my last attack of tonsillitis I didn't have the heart to tell her that
all the time he was looking sympathetic with his right eye, he was winking
at me with his left.
Now that she is gone, however, I don't see how I could have thought,
even for a moment, that I should be glad, and I 've been sitting here for an
hour just looking at my room and all the nice things she advised me about
and helped me to choose—wishing she could see how cosey it is late at
night with the green lamp lighted and a little fire going. (It is n't really cool
enough for a fire; I had to take my coat off for a while, the room got so
warm—but I was anxious to know how the andirons looked with a blaze
behind them.) I suppose she is lying awake in the sleeping-car thinking of
me. She made me move my bed to the other side of the room, so that it
would n't be near the window. I moved it back again; but I think now I 'll
change it again to the way she liked it.
Of course I was disappointed last May when I found I hadn't drawn a
room in one of the college buildings. I had an idea that if you did n't live in
one of the buildings owned by the college you would n't feel, somehow, as
if you "belonged." Before I arrived in Cambridge I worried a good deal over
it. The old Harvard men at home were most unsatisfactory about this when I
asked their advice. The ones who had lived in the Yard when they were in
college seemed to think there was n't any particular use in going to college
at all unless you could live either in their old rooms or some in the same
building; and the ones who had lived outside as I am going to do (this year,
anyhow) said the college buildings were nice enough in their way, but if I
could only get the dear old place (which was pulled down fifteen years ago)
where James Russell Lowell had scratched his name on the window-pane,
and where somebody else (I 've forgotten who it was) crawled up the big

chimney when the sheriff came to arrest him for debt and was discovered
because he did not crawl far enough, I should be all right.
I don't see how the good times and the advantages of a place like this
hold out for so long; everybody who has been here speaks as if he had about
used them up.
Well, we found rooms pleading to be rented; every other house in
Cambridge has a "Student's Room to Let" card in the window. Even some
of the rooms in the Yard had been given up at the last minute by fellows
who flunked their exams. Mamma said she felt very sorry for the poor boys;
and after that the enormity of my having been conditioned in physics and
solid geometry decreased considerably. The trouble (there were four days
full of it) wasn't in finding a good place, but in trying to decide on some one
place. For a while it looked as though I should either have to live in five
separate houses—some of them over a mile apart—or give up going to
college. We dragged up and down all the quiet side streets within a
reasonable distance of the Yard, ringing bells and asking questions until the
words "I should like to look at" and "What is the price of?" began to sound
like some kind of a silly English Meisterschaft system. Several times when
we were very tired we wandered by mistake into houses we had been to
before. This made the landladies exceedingly peevish; but mamma said it
was just as well, because now we knew what their true characters really
were.
We found that we could rent some of the rooms lighted and heated; but
most of them were merely "lit and het."
All the houses in Cambridge and many of the buildings in the Yard
seemed to be disgorging roomfuls of old furniture and consuming cartloads
of new, and everywhere we went we met strings of cheerful, energetic
mothers with tired, rather cross-looking sons. I've seen only one fellow with

his father so far, and they sort of apologized for the fact by being dressed in
deep mourning.
At the end of three days we 'd picked out five rooms. Considered in a
lump, they seemed fine; but tackling them separately, mamma could n't
decide which one was least objectionable. One was in a part of town that
"looked damp"—a man across the street unfortunately sneezed just as we
were passing a stone wall covered with green moss. The second smelt of
cooking. On the steps of the third a groceryman was waiting to deliver
several gallons of gasoline (this one was almost struck off the list). The
fourth was near the river (we had the bad luck to be in that part of town
when the tide was out), and from the windows of the fifth there was a merry
little view of a graveyard. We simply could n't make up our minds, and
were standing in the middle of a narrow, rather shabby little street two or
three blocks below the Square discussing the matter, when a door behind us
opened and a mother and son (we turned to look) came out, followed by a
gray-haired woman—evidently the landlady—who was doing the talking, in
a very New England voice, for all three. The mother was slim and pretty,
and had on a beautiful dress that went swish-swash-swish when she walked
away, and the fellow looked like her; he was very handsome.
"Well, I 'm real glad to know you," the landlady said to the fellow's
mother. "Jus' seems 's if I could n't rest till I knew the young men's folks;
dustin' their photographs every day makes it sort of different. It do—don't
it? Oh, yes—I 'll take care of him. They get real mad at me, the young men
do, sometimes, for makin' them change their shoes when it's snow-in' and
makin' them wear their rubber coats when it's rai-nin'. They 're in too much
of a hurry, they are. That's what's the matter with them." She gave the fellow
a roguish look, and he and his mother walked up the street laughing as if
they were very much pleased.

"I think," said mamma (who had become strangely animated on
hearing of the change of shoes)—"I think that before we decide on one of
these five rooms we 'll go in there." So we went up to the gray-haired
woman, who had lingered outside to talk baby talk to a cat that was making
gothic arches of itself all over the piazza, and in about seven minutes by the
watch we 'd signed the lease of the last vacant rooms in the house.
A short, steep staircase like the companionway of a ship leads up to a
landing about the size of a kitchen table. The edges of the steps are covered
with tin and are terribly slippery. The door on the left opens into my study,
and at the end of that is my bedroom, and next to that is a great big
bathroom (it's bigger than the other two) with a porcelain tub and a shower
which I am to share with the fellow who lives just across the staircase on
the right. Mrs. Chester, the landlady, says: "All the young men thinks an
awful lot of that bathroom."
The study is so small that we did n't have to buy as much furniture as
we expected to. I have an oak desk with a rolling top that makes a noise like
some one shovelling coal when you open and shut it, and usually sticks
half-way. Of course, when we finally got it out from town (Boston is about
four miles from Cambridge, and it takes anywhere from three days to a
week for an express wagon to make the trip), we found that it was much too
large to go up the staircase. But Mrs. Chester said we could take out the
back of the house and have it swung up to the room on ropes—the "young
men" always did that when they wanted pianos or sofas, or desks like mine.
I wasn't present at the operation, as I had to go in town to lunch with
mamma, but it was successfully performed (by "a real handy gentleman
from down Gloucester way, who used to be a fisherman and is a carpenter
now"), for I found the desk in the room when I returned and the walls of the
house looked about the same.

Besides the desk I have an oak chair with a back that lets up and down
by means of a brass rod; its cushions are covered with gray corduroy. Then
there is another chair, a revolving one (very painful), that goes with the
desk. We bought a bookcase at a shop just off the Square, from an odious
little man who put his hand on my shoulder and said to mamma, "They will
grow up, won't they?" It looks rather bare, as there aren't any books in it
yet; but mamma would n't let me fill it, although right next door to the place
where we bought it there were loads of books in the window for five and
ten cents apiece.
We got some Turkish rugs at an auction in town. The man said they
never would wear out. When they arrived here and I saw them for the first
time by daylight (they had gas at the sale) I knew what he meant. However,
mamma darned them very nicely, and as everything else looks so new,
perhaps it's just as well.
I 've put the photographs of mamma and papa, and the one of Mildred
in the ball dress and big hat with white ostrich feathers, and the one of
Sidney in his little cart with the two goats, on the mantelpiece. I 'm afraid I
never cared much for the goats when I was at home, but to-night I 've been
thinking of all the funny things they used to do and wondering if I'll ever
see them again. They're such cute little beasts. Over the mantelpiece I have
two crimson flags with the sticks crossed.
This evening while I was sitting in front of the fire trying to decide
whether I ought to begin my diary now or wait until college opened to-
morrow and things began to happen, the door downstairs suddenly rattled
and slammed, and some one came clattering up the tin steps at a great rate.
Then the door across the landing was unlocked, and I heard whoever it was
falling over chairs and upsetting things in the dark; and all the time he kept
roaring at the top of his voice: "Oh, Mrs. Chester! Ay-y-y-y-y, Mrs. Chester,

where are you?" Mrs. Chester had told me a few minutes before that she
was "just goin' to step up street to see how Mis' Buckson 's comin' along
with them rooms o' hers," so I called out that she was n't at home. Then the
voice answered, "Oh, thank you;" and after a few more things in the other
room had fallen on the floor and smashed, the fellow who was making all
the fuss came across and stood in my doorway.
I thought for a second that the reason he did n't come in was that he
was so big he could n't. I knew that the ceilings of the house were low and
that my study wasn't very large, but I had n't realized before how small it all
was. The fellow blocked up the whole doorway; his shoulders, in a loose,
shaggy gray coat, stretched clear across. His face was burned a deep brown,
and his hair was very black and looked rather long, as it evidently had n't
been brushed for a good while, and he wanted to know if I could let him
have a match. I could see that he was taking in my room as he stood there,
and I think he smiled a little at something; but then he seemed to be smiling
anyhow (in a different way), so I was n't sure. I jumped up and got him a
box of matches (somehow I knew at once that he wasn't the other Freshman
who has rooms in the house, although I can't think why, as he did n't look
old), and he thanked me, saying he was sorry to trouble me, and went back
to his room.
I felt sort of excited and restless after that, and thought I would sit
down and write mamma all about him; but just as I was beginning to he
stopped humming (I don't think he can be a member of the Glee Club, as he
only struck the right note once by accident; still I knew perfectly well what
he was trying to sing) and began to laugh. Then he came over to my door
again with his hands in his pockets and said,—
"You did n't happen to see an iron bedstead lying around the streets
anywhere, did you? The good Chester has evidently spent the last three

months in putting my rooms in order and I can't find a thing." I told him I
had seen a bed in the back yard this afternoon, but that I did n't think it
could be his. He asked me very seriously why not. And then all at once I got
horribly rattled. I didn't like to tell him that the bed had n't looked nearly big
enough for him (it was a little narrow thing), for I was afraid he might think
me fresh. Then besides, I found that I had instinctively stood up when I saw
him, and as there wasn't any particular reason why I should have done this,
I got sort of confused.
"Of course it's a very nice little bed," I hastened to add. Whereupon he
burst out laughing with a loud whoop.
"If it 's such a nice one it certainly can't be mine, and I 'd better go
down and swipe it right away," he said at last, and clattered downstairs. I
tried again to write to mamma, but he made such a noise coming upstairs
with pieces of bed and running down again that I could n't fix my mind.
Then, too, I kept wondering whether I ought to offer to help him. Finally I
went out as he was coming up with a mattress on his shoulder and asked,
"Was it your bed, after all?" which made him laugh again and say: "I
wouldn't tell you for anything in the world. If you aren't too busy, though, I
wish you would help me put the beastly thing together."
We tried for about half an hour to make the bed stand up. It looked
simple enough, but whenever we got the sides firm and more or less
parallel, the back and front would wobble and fall to the floor. Once we had
all four pieces standing beautifully, but just as we put on the woven wire
business and Mr. Duggie (that's what Mrs. Chester calls him—I don't think
it 's his real name, though) exclaimed, "I have the honor to report, sir, that
the allied forces have taken New Bedford," the whole thing collapsed and
pinched his finger fearfully as it came down. After that we sat on the floor
awhile. He smoked a pipe and glanced meditatively at the ruins of the bed

every now and then, and at last turned to me and said, "Is this your first year
here?" I didn't let him see how pleased I was that he had not discovered I
was a Freshman, and merely answered, "Yes."
We talked a long time—about all kinds of things. I asked him a string
of questions that had been on my mind for months: whether it is better to
live in a private house, one of the big private halls, or in the Yard (I called it
the "Campus," and he looked queer for a moment and said it was known as
the Yard here); where would be a good place to eat; whether he thought my
allowance was big enough (I told him how much I was going to have); and
what was the best way to make friends and get on teams and clubs and
musical societies and crews and papers. He answered everything, although
once or twice he puffed at his pipe and looked at me a good while before
speaking. I couldn't tell whether the questions had n't occurred to him
before, or whether he didn't know just what to tell me. Of course I can't
remember all he said, but it sounded so important that afterward I scribbled
as much of it as I could in a notebook.

ROOMS IN THE YARD
ADVANTAGES

General Washington may have stabled his horse (the iron-gray that never
put his front feet to the ground in the presence of an artist) in your bedroom.
When girls come out to vespers (Thursdays from November to May)
and stop to look at the Yard, you can stop whatever you happen to be doing
and look at them.
In May and June the morning and evening views from your windows
are different from and more beautiful than anything in the world.

The Glee Club (weather permitting) sings under the trees; you lie on
your window-seat in the twilight and wonder whether, after graduating, you
will accept Fame or Fortune.
Proximity to lectures during the annual inundations of December,
January, February, March, and April.

DISADVANTAGES

Too much effort involved in taking a bath. What ought to be an innocent
pleasure becomes a morbid family pride.
Accessibility to bores who want to kill time while waiting for their
next lecture. At first you think this is Popularity.
Enforced quiet after 9 P.M.—at which hour you usually close your
books and feel like making a noise.
Enforced activity before 9 A.M.—until which hour you always close
your eyes and try not to feel at all.
Necessity of burning a kind of coal that refuses to light (or to stay
lighted) for anybody but the janitor, who is never in the basement, where
you always firmly believe (in spite of your daily failure) that you are going
to find him.

BOARD

Mrs. Muldooney's is by all means the most desirable place. It is crowded,
hot, noisy, expensive, and not particularly nourishing. Mrs. Muldooney is a
tall, grim, steel-armored old cruiser of sixty-five, with dark-blue hair, who
doles out eleven canned cherries to every man at luncheon and sends in
word from the kitchen that there aren't any more. She tries to collect

twenty-five cents when you have a guest; but as you promptly disown your
guest, she is usually foiled. Her place, however, is always crowded with
Freshmen, and I ought to go there.

ALLOWANCE

My allowance is generous. It ought to satisfy my every need; but it won't.

TEAMS, CREWS, SOCIETIES, PAPERS

Try enthusiastically but not too seriously to take part in everything. In this
way you find out what kind of amusement really amuses you—which as
you grow older is a source of great content.

FRIENDS

Friends, in the true sense of the word, are divine accidents beyond all
human control. You will probably meet with four or five such accidents in
your college career. For the rest—be polite to everybody, and you will soon
have the satisfaction of knowing that your position, both in the University
and in the world, is, at least, unique.

CLUBS

Vide supra, under "Friends."

I was just going to ask him something else, when we heard Mrs. Chester
exclaiming,—

"Land sakes, if it ain't Mr. Duggie! I saw the light from Mis' Buckson's
parlor."
"Hello, you dear old buzzard! How dare you turn me out in the cold
this way?" he called to her; and as she came in, he jumped up and took both
her hands. "I 'm so glad to see you again." She gave him a little push, and
looked pleased.
"Law, Mr. Duggie—how you talk! He's got real fleshy—ain't he?" she
added, looking at me. She asked him where he 'd been all summer, and he
told her he 'd been off shooting in the Rocky Mountains, and had brought
her a breastpin made of an elk's tooth that she'd have to wear on Sundays
when she went to see her married daughter in Somerville. I thought I ought
to leave, but did not know how to interrupt them exactly; so I turned and
examined some silver cups on the mantelpiece. There were five beauties,
but I could n't make out the inscriptions on them.
"You 've had lots of visitors the last few days. They kept a-comin' to
find out when you 'll be back. The Dean was here to-day—a real sociable
gentleman, aren't he?—and he wants you to go right 'round and see him as
soon as you can. And yesterday that little man—I forget his name—oh, you
know, he's the President of the Crimson—came to find out about something.
He said you were the only one who could tell him. And then there 've been
lots of young men to see about the football—oh, my, just crowds of them,
and they all left notes. I 'll run down and get them, and then I 'll put up your
bed."
After she left, I said good-night. It's awfully late, and I have to get up
early, to be in time to register.
I wonder who he is. I hope he didn't think I was fresh. I don't believe
he did, though, for as I was going he said,—

"We 're such near neighbors, you must drop in when you haven't
anything better to do."
Mamma's train must have passed Utica by this time.

II

Well, I 've learned a lot of things during the past week, that are n't
advertised in the catalogue. If I 've neglected to make a note of them until
now, it has been my misfortune, and not my fault.
We registered on Wednesday morning—Freshmen have to register the
day before college really opens—and I confess I was a little disappointed at
the informal way such an important act of one's life is done. In the first
place, as you can drop in any time between nine A.M. and one P.M., you
don't see the whole class together. Then the room we registered in might
have been in the High School at home. I don't know what I expected
exactly, but it certainly was n't a bare, square room, a desk on a low
platform, some plaster casts, and a lot of plain wooden chairs arranged in
rows on an inclined plane. However, when I think the matter over, I don't
see what else they could have.
A dissatisfied-looking little man with a red necktie sat reading a
newspaper at the desk when I went in, and near him—reading a book—was
a younger fellow who looked as if he might be a student. There were piles
of registration cards on the desk, and after I had stood there a moment, not
knowing what to do, the little man looked up absently from his paper,
handed me some cards with a feeble sort of gesture, and murmured in a
melancholy, slightly trembling, and very sarcastic voice,—

"... This gentleman is come to me
With commendation from great potentates,
And here he means to spend his time awhile."

Then he yawned, and took up the paper again. The young man, without
apparently thinking this remark in the least odd, closed his book on his
thumb so as not to lose the place, and gave me another card, saying in a
perfectly businesslike voice,—
"Please fill this one out, too." I sat down at a bench to write, and just
then five or six other fellows came in. One of them was the good-looking
chap (with the pretty mother) who rooms in the same house with me. I
hadn't seen him since the day I signed my lease. I listened to hear if the little
man at the desk would spring anything weird on them; but as they went
right up to him, and took cards as if they knew all about it, and retreated to
the back of the room, he didn't have time. They talked and laughed a good
deal, and once they got into a scuffle, but the instructors didn't even glance
up. I finished answering the questions on my cards, and was reading them
over, when one of the fellows behind me said,—
"I'll ask him—we live in the same house;" and the handsome one came
and sat down beside me. There was something they did n't understand in
making out the cards, and the first thing I knew, they were all gathered
around me examining mine. I felt quite important. But the next minute I felt
equally cheap.
The cards that had been given us by the young man with the book had
to be filled out with one's name and address and religion. When the good-
looking one (whose name I 've since found out is Berrisford) came to it, he
began to giggle, and after he had written on it he showed it to the man next
to him, who burst out laughing, and passed it on to the others. They all

laughed as soon as they saw it, and I was just about to hold out my hand to
take it, when the young instructor closed his book, and said in a rather tired,
dry tone,—
"By the way, unless you actually happen to be Buddhists or Hindus or
Mohammedans, or followers of Confucius, kindly refrain from saying so on
the card; only four men have indulged in that particular jest this morning,
which, in comparison with former years, is really very few. I begin to feel
encouraged; pray don't depress me."
I don't know what Berrisford had written, but he got very red while the
instructor was speaking, and crumpled the card into a little lump which he
afterward slipped into his pocket. The others pretended to be deeply
absorbed in their writing just then; but one of them snorted hysterically.
If anything like that had happened to me, I think I should have expired
with mortification; but Berrisford after a minute or two did n't seem to mind
it at all. I almost think it encouraged him to do something even more idiotic.
There are two large, fine statues standing in the front corners of the
room. One of them is a Greek athlete in the act of hurling something not
unlike a pancake, and is called, I believe, The Discus Thrower. (We have a
little one in the library at home.) The other is a venerable old man in
flowing robes—probably Homer or Sophocles or some such person. Well,
we had all gone up to the desk with our cards. Berrisford was first, and just
as he got there he stopped (without giving his cards to the little man who
reached out for them), and looked inquiringly from statue to statue.
Berrisford has a beautiful, silly face with big, innocent eyes, and when he
talks his manner is graceful—almost timid; you can't help liking it. I could
see that he impressed the instructors just the way he did mamma and me the
day we saw him with his mother. He looked at the statues a moment, and
then said to the little man,—

"Would you mind telling me, please, which of these gentlemen is the
President of the college?" His voice was so deferential, and there was
something so eager and earnest and pure in his expression, I really believe
that for a moment the instructor thought he was just a nice fool, and was on
the point of kindly explaining what the statues represented. He didn't,
though, for one of the fellows in the background tittered and ran out of the
room, and the little man leaned back in his chair, examined Berrisford very
deliberately, and then remarked in his queer, sarcastic way,—
"'Sir, thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth; but it speeds too
fast—'twill tire!'"
As soon as we got outside, Berrisford said,—
"What a disappointing little creature! I had an idea he would be very
angry, and he was n't at all."
"Did you want him to be angry?" I asked, rather surprised.
"Why, yes, of course," he answered. "It's so interesting to watch them;
there are so many different ways of losing a temper. Sea-captains are the
most satisfactory, I think. I discovered that last spring on my way to
Europe. I go up to them when they 're very busy—just getting out of a
harbor or something—and exclaim, 'Oh, I say, Captain—shall I steer?' You
can't imagine how furious it makes them." I said I thought I could, and we
parted. He seems to have a great many friends; he has n't spent a night at
home since college opened—a week ago.
Well, I went to see my adviser, who helped me select my studies for
the year. That is to say, he hypnotized me into taking a lot of things I really
don't see why I should know. However, as I don't seem to have what he
called "a startling predilection" for anything (my entrance exams. divulged
this), and as he was a pleasant young man who invited me to dinner next
week, I allowed myself to be influenced by him. He gave me a lot of little

pamphlets with the courses and the hours at which they come marked in red
ink. I 've forgotten what some of them are, as we have n't had any real
lectures yet—just rigmaroles about what books to buy.
For the first few days the whole college and all the streets and
buildings near it seemed to be in such confusion that I couldn't walk a block
without feeling terribly excited—the way I used to feel when I was a kid,
and we were all going to the State fair or the circus, and mamma would
insist on our eating luncheon although we did n't want a thing. Along the
sidewalk in the Square there was a barricade of trunks so high that you
could n't see over it, to say nothing of huge mounds of travelling bags and
dress-suit cases and queer-shaped leather things, with banjos and mandolins
and guitars and golf-sticks in them. And from morning till night there were
always at least four or five fellows telling the expressmen that it was
"perfectly absurd;" that they simply had to have their trunks immediately;
that the service was abominable, and that the whole place was a hundred
and fifty years behind the times, anyhow. All of which the expressmen may
or may not have agreed with, for they hardly ever answered back, and just
went on digging steamer trunks and hatboxes out of the ruins and slamming
them into wagons to make room for the loads that kept arriving every little
while from town.
It was very interesting to watch so many fellows of my own age or a
little older hurrying about or standing in groups talking and laughing and
looking glad to be here. But at the same time it was sort of unsatisfactory
and hopeless. I didn't like to stay in my room much of the time, as I had a
feeling (I have n't got over it yet) that if I did I might miss something. Yet,
when I went out, I had so few things to do that, unless I took a walk—
which of course leads one away from the excitement—there was n't much
point in my being around at all. No one stuck his head from an upper

window in the Yard and called out, "Ay-y-y-y-y, Tommy Wood, come up
here," when I passed by; and no one slipped up behind me, and put his
hands over my eyes and waited for me to guess who it was, because, with
the exception of Mr. Duggie and Dick Benton and Berrisford, I didn't know
a soul. I often saw Mr. Duggie in the Square, but as he was always with a
crowd or striding along in a great hurry, and being stopped every few feet
by some one who asked him questions that made him laugh and run away, I
got a chance to speak to him only once. He nodded his head and smiled in a
professional kind of way without in the least remembering who I was. Dick
Benton I did n't have any hesitation in going right up to, as at home I had
heard him solemnly promise mamma that he would look out for me and
keep his eye on me. Of course I don't expect him to do this; but I confess I
did feel sort of disappointed for a minute when he said: "Well, Wood" (he
calls me Tommy at home), "when did you arrive? Getting settled? Got your
courses picked out? Awful bore, is n't it? Well, here 's my car—going to
meet some people in town and am late now. How 's Mrs. Wood? So glad.
Hunt me up when you 're settled. So long." He swung himself on a passing
car and I turned away and stared at a shop window. I must have stood there
several minutes before I realized it was a bakery, and that there was
absolutely nothing to look at behind the glass except three loaves of bread
and a dish of imitation ice cream that had n't been dusted for weeks (it has
just this minute occurred to me for the first time that I must have been
homesick that day and the next. Isn't it queer, I didn't know what was the
matter with me?) I bet I can describe every article in every shop window in
the Square; for there was nothing for me to do the first few days except to
walk up and down and pretend I was going somewhere. Of course I tried to
get the books the various instructors told me about; but every time I asked

for them at the three bookstores I found either that the last one had just been
sold or that they had n't arrived yet.
Mrs. Muldooney's tables were unfortunately full when I applied and I
have been eating around at the most ridiculous places—ice-cream parlors,
and dairy restaurants where you sit on high stools and grab things, because
you can't get over the feeling that a conductor will stick his head in the door
pretty soon and say, "All Abo-urrrd."
On Bloody Monday night the Freshmen reception took place. I
scarcely know how to touch on that event, as my part in it (or rather in what
followed) was so unexpectedly prominent and terrible.
The old college men at home had let drop all kinds of mysterious hints
about Bloody Monday. In their time, apparently, it was the custom for the
upper-classmen to send grewsome notices to the Freshmen, telling them
what would happen if they did n't have a punch in their rooms on that
occasion. These warnings were written in blood and began and ended with a
skull and cross-bones. Then in the evening there was a rush in the Yard
between the Freshmen and Sophomores. The old graduates knew perfectly
well that the punches had been given up long ago; but I don't think they
liked to admit it even to themselves—although they do groan a good deal
about college days not being what they used to be. From what they said I
could not tell whether there really were such things nowadays or not, so I
wrote a little note to Mr. Duggie and left it on the stairs, where the postman
puts our letters, asking him what to do if I got a notice, and if there was
going to be any rush. He answered: "The custom, I am sorry to say, is
ausgespielt; it must have been great sport. As for the rush—theoretically we
don't have it. By the way, my name (Mrs. Chester to the contrary
notwithstanding) is not Mr. Duggie, but Douglas Sherwin."

At that time I did n't know what the second sentence of his note meant,
but I understand now; it dawned on me during the speeches at the reception.
In some mysterious, indescribable way it was communicated to me as I sat
there in the crowded theatre. Whether it came to me most from my
classmates—packed into the pew-like seats and standing in rows against the
wall—or from the professors who spoke on the stage, I can't say. I simply
became aware of the fact that something was going to happen—something
that wasn't on the program. It was in the air—it made me restless, and I
could n't help thinking of that sultry afternoon out West when the seven
pack-horses stampeded just as we were about to start; I knew the little
devils were going to do something and they knew it, too, for they all began
to buck at the same instant. But I hadn't said anything about it—and neither
had they.
It was just like that while the speeches of welcome were being made in
Sanders Theatre. They were fine speeches; they really did make you
welcome and part of it all—in a way you hadn't thought of before. You
couldn't help being proud that you "belonged," and after the President had
spoken and the fellow next to me yelled in my ear (he had to yell, the
cheering was so loud), "He 's a great man, all right," I felt all over that he
was a great man—everybody did. But nevertheless, there was something
else tingling through the noise and excitement that we felt just as much. The
professors themselves felt it. The elaborate way in which every one of them
ignored the subject of Bloody Monday was almost pathetic. The Dean in his
speech ignored it so radiantly that the audience actually laughed.
Theoretically as (Douglas Sherwin had said) there would be no rush; the
speeches made one quite ashamed to think of such a thing.
I was n't there when it started, for after the speeches I went with the
crowd into the great dining-hall to be received. It would be nice, I thought,

to be introduced to the distinguished men and to get to know some of my
classmates. Every one was trying to move toward the further left-hand
corner of the vast place, and I soon found myself hemmed in and carried—
oh, so slowly—along with the tide. It was very hot, and as I am not
particularly tall I would more than once have given a good deal to be out in
the fresh night air; but the thought of shaking hands with the President and
the gentleman who invented plane geometry (I did n't know whether he had
anything to do with solid or not; I never studied it), and another gentleman
(a humorist) who wrote a book and called it The Easy Greek Reader,
cheered me up. I knew, too, that mamma would be glad to hear I had talked
to these men. But when, after at least half an hour of waiting and pushing, I
reached the corner of the room, I discovered that it was n't the distinguished
men we had all along been gasping and struggling for; it was the ice cream.
The distinguished men were lined up away across the room all alone; if it
had been rumored beforehand that they were indisposed with the plague,
they could n't have been much more detached. Every now and then some
young fellow—probably an upperclassman—would snatch a Freshman
from the throng, say something in his ear (it looked as if he were
murmuring, "They 're all perfectly harmless—only you mustn't prod them
or throw things in the cage)", and march him up to be introduced. I watched
these proceedings awhile, and then, as the ice cream in the meanwhile had
given out, I left and started to walk to my room by way of the Yard.
A sound of confused cheering reached me the moment I got outside,
and when I passed through the gate I could see down the long quadrangle
what seemed to be a battle of will-o'-the-wisps—a swaying, shifting,
meeting, parting, revolving myriad of flickering lights and lurid faces. I ran
until I reached the edge of the crowd, and stood for a minute or two staring
and listening. The fellows were surging wildly up and down and across the

Yard with torches in their hands, cheering and singing. Whenever enough
men got together, they would lower their torches and charge the whole
length of the Yard—amid a howl of resentment—like a company of lancers.
Then by the time they had turned to plough back again, another group
would have formed, which usually met the first one half-way with a terrible
roar and a clash of tin torches,—a drench of kerosene and a burst of flame.
Two German bands that never stopped playing the "Blue Danube" and the
"Washington Post" were huddled at either end of the Yard. Now and then a
sort of tidal wave of lights and faces and frantic hands would swell rapidly
toward them, lap them up, engulf them, and then go swirling back again to
the middle. But they never stopped playing,—even when they became
hopelessly scattered and horribly reunited.
I saw two policemen fluttering distractedly on the brink—pictures of
conscious inefficiency—and felt sorry for the poor things. As I was standing
there wondering where I could get a torch, a slim middle-aged man with an
iron-gray beard bustled up to them, and the three held a sort of hurried
consultation. It ended by the iron-gray man's (he was a professor) suddenly
leaving them and mounting the steps of University Hall. His expression as
he turned to face the crowd was the kind that tries its best to be persuasive
and popular and tremendously resolute all at once, but only succeeds in
being wan and furtive. He filled his lungs and began to talk, I suppose, as
loud as he could; yet all I heard was an occasional despairing "Now, fellows
... It seems to me, fellows ... Don't you think it would be better..."
No one paid any attention to him, however, and in an incredibly short
time the crowd had crushed itself as far away as it could into the
quadrangle's lower end. I made my way over there, and as I was pushing
into the thick of things a man next to me exclaimed to no one in particular:
"They've sent for Duggie Sherwin, the captain of the team, as a last resort—

he's going to say something from the porch of Matthews." I saw I never
could get near Matthews by trying to forge straight ahead; so, as I wanted to
hear Mr. Duggie (I hadn't known until that minute what he was), I extricated
myself and ran around the edge of the crowd. Even then I wasn't very near,
and, although I could n't hear a word he said, I could see him—standing on
a chair—towering above everybody and smiling a little as if he enjoyed it. I
didn't know what he said; to tell the truth, I don't think anybody did, except
perhaps the men right around him. Yet in about a minute two or three
fellows began to yell, "All over," "The stuff is off," and "Now will you be
good;" and the crowd fell back a little, attempting to spread out. The spell
somehow was broken; for owing to Mr. Duggie's wonderful influence we
would have dispersed quietly if it had n't been for that flighty idiot,
Berrisford.
I had picked up a torch that some one had thrown away and was
moving along with it when Berrisford dashed up to me with something
round—about the size of a football—wrapped in a newspaper. One of the
sleeves of his coat was gone; he was breathing hard and seemed to be
fearfully excited.
"It's your turn now," he gasped, and thrust the parcel into my hand.
"Why—what is it?—what are we going to do? The rush is over," I
answered, for I did n't understand.
"Of course the rush is over—stupid," he said hurriedly. "We're playing
a game now—'The King's Helmet'—and you 're It. I was It—but I'm not
any more; you are now. Hurry up, for Heaven's sake, or they'll get it. Here
they come—run for all you 're worth; it may mean a lot for the class." This
last and the fact of my catching sight just then of some men running toward
me decided me. I clutched the parcel to my side and scudded down the
Yard. Every one fell back to let me pass, and my progress was followed by

screams of delight. I never had attracted so much attention before, and from
the things that were shouted at me as I flew along I knew I was doing well.
At the end of the Yard I ran smash into a building, but although somewhat
dazed I managed to hang on to the parcel, turn, and look back. The only
person pursuing me, apparently, was a bareheaded policeman—and he was
alarmingly near. But I managed to pass him, and on my return trip I noticed
that I received even a greater ovation than the one the fellows had given me
at first. I did n't know what it all meant, and I was nearly dead, and
suddenly tripped, staggered, and fell into the arms of a second policeman
who handled me very roughly and seized Berrisford's package. It contained
the helmet of the bareheaded one, who arrived in a moment exceedingly
exhausted, but able, nevertheless, to shake his fist in my face.
The parade to the police station must have been several blocks long—I
heard about it afterward. First there was me with an escort of two officers,
all the muckers in Cambridge, and the Freshman class in a body, who
started a collection on the way over with which to bail me out. Then there
was a German band playing the "Blue Danube," and after that "a vast
concourse" (as Berrisford called it) of Sophomores, upperclassmen, and law
students with another German band playing the "Washington Post" in their
midst.
I was almost paralyzed with fright, and my head ached dreadfully from
the blow I had given it against the building; but although I did n't show it I
could n't help feeling furious at Berrisford. He stayed right behind me on
the way over and kept saying at intervals,—
"It's all right, old man. Don't worry—there's no use worrying; just
leave everything to me."

III

Perhaps, after all, my troubles were for the best. It was not my fault that I
fell into the hands of the law; nothing was further from my thoughts than a
desire to be disorderly. Of course the teasing I have had to endure is pretty
hard, and it is most annoying to acquire a nickname at the outset
(everybody calls me "Trusting Thomas" or "Tommy Trusting"), and
although I realize now that I was pretty "easy" to do what Berrisford told
me to, my conscience has been untroubled from the first. That, after all, is
the main thing.
Berrisford, I think, would have tried (as he said) "to smooth it all over"
at the police station, but very fortunately the arrival of the Regent and my
adviser and the iron-gray man at once took the matter out of his hands. I
don't know what they did to the officers, but I was quickly transferred from
the police station to the room of my adviser. It was more or less impossible
to return the money that had been collected from the class to bail me out
with, so just as I left a fellow with a loud voice proposed amid great
cheering to give it to the Freshman Eleven.
There had been something spectacular and brilliant about my progress
from the Yard to the lock-up that, terrified though I was, I could not help
appreciating in an abject, wretched sort of a way. But the silent walk down
a back street to the hall in which my adviser lives was just common or
garden melancholy. The sidewalk was broad, so we swung along four
abreast. No one followed us, of course, and we went the entire distance in
almost unbroken silence. Once the Regent cleared his throat and said in
hard, cheerful, deliberate tones,—
"I see by the evening paper that Japan will not accede to the request of
the Powers." No one answered for about a minute, and I began to fear that

neither my adviser nor the iron-gray man would take advantage of the
opportunity to exclaim, "What a wonderful little people they are!" I was
vaguely disappointed; for of course when the Japanese are mentioned one
instinctively waits for somebody to say this. However, just as I was
beginning to lose hope and had almost made up my mind to risk the
comment myself, the iron-gray man burst out with, "What a remarkable
little people they are!" and my foolish heart was reassured!
I must say that when we reached our destination and the inquisition
began, they were—all three of them—mighty fair and square. The
circumstances of my capture were decidedly against me, and my defence, I
realized, sounded simply foolish. (At one point my adviser jumped up
abruptly and closed a window; I think he was afraid he was going to laugh.)
There was nothing for me to do but tell my story: how I had watched the
rush from the bottom of the steps; how I had gone over to hear Mr. Duggie's
speech, and how Berrisford (I didn't give his name, however) had come up
to me with the helmet in a newspaper and told me we were playing a game
and that I was It. I felt very earnest and tremulous when I began, but by the
time I finished I could n't help wanting to shut a few windows myself. That
—out of the whole howling mob—they had succeeded in seizing one
miserable, little half-dead Freshman who had taken no part in the actual
disturbance, struck me as being like something in an imbecile farce. It
impressed the others, I think, in much the same way, although the iron-gray
man, after a moment of silence, said: "Do you really expect us to believe all
this?"
"No, sir," I answered; "I don't see how you conscientiously can." But
they decided to believe it, nevertheless. My adviser asked me if I knew who
gave me the helmet, and on learning that I did, he intimated that he would
like to know the man's name. I preferred, however, not to tell; and they

were very nice about that, too. (I shouldn't have told even if they had
chosen to be disagreeable about it.)
As far as I am concerned I don't believe any action will be taken. There
is no end, though, to the ominous rumors of what the Faculty will do in
general. One day we hear that the two lower classes won't be allowed to
play football this year, and the next, that all the Freshmen are to be put on
what is called "probation;" everybody, in an indefinite sort of way, is very
indignant. To tell the truth, I don't see why; but as all the rest are, I am, too.
Berrisford has been very nice ever since that Monday night. At first I
think it was a desire to "make amends" that caused him to spend so much
time in my room and ask me to do so many things with him and his friends;
but of course he never put it that way. He was very much worried when I
told him that my adviser and the Regent had tried to find out who had given
me the helmet, and he wanted to rush and confess. It took me a good while
to persuade him not to. In fact, I did n't persuade him exactly, but only got
him to agree at length to let Mr. Duggie decide. Mr. Duggie thought the
matter over for a moment, and said that as my refusal to tell hadn't, so far as
he could see, made me a martyr on the altar of friendship, he thought it
would be unnecessarily theatrical for Berrisford to give himself up.
One day Berrisford asked me where I ate, and when I told him I had
been trying the places in and about the Square, he said: "Why, you silly
thing—why don't you join my crowd at Mrs. Brown's?" He spoke as if the
idea had just occurred to him, but that same morning when he introduced
me to a man who came up to his room, the fellow said: "I hear you 're
coming to our table. That's good." So it must have all been arranged
beforehand. Berrisford 's awfully generous and impulsive and kind, only
he's so scatter-brained and eccentric you never know what he 's going to do
next.

I 've done no end of interesting things since I last wrote in my diary. I
bought a song called "Love's Sorrow" at a music store, had the man play it
for me five or six times, learned the words and then attempted to sing it at
the trial of Glee Club candidates. I 'm sure I sang all the notes and I
remembered the words without a mistake; but something was wrong. For
after I stopped singing the fellow at the piano went on playing the
accompaniment several minutes. And when I took my seat I heard one of
the judges murmur as he wrote something on a slip of paper: "Fourth heat;
Tommy Trusting shows heels to the bunch and wins in a canter." They told
me I would see my name in the "Crimson" when they wanted me for
rehearsal. It hasn't appeared yet and that was some time ago.
Then one morning I borrowed a jersey and some moleskins from a
fellow at our table and went over to Soldiers' Field to try for the football
team. First we lined up for short sprints of twenty yards or so; then they
divided us into squads and made us practise falling on the ball (I found
chloroform liniment very good for this; but Berrisford maintains that there's
nothing like osteopathy). Afterward we practised place kicks, drop kicks
and punts; candidates for tackle were lined up against one another and tried
breaking through; quarter-backs and centre-rushes practised passing and
snapping back the ball. I tried everything—even the dummy.
The dummy is an imitation man in football clothes, suspended by
pulley from a wire stretched between posts twenty-five or thirty feet apart.
It is weighted by sand in a bag that is supposed to slide up toward the pulley
as you tackle the thing and grind its nose in the dirt; only it does n't. What
actually happens is that some one pulls the dummy rapidly from one post to
the other, and while the creature is spinning through the air you hurl
yourself at it, cling to it desperately with your finger-nails and teeth for
about the tenth of a second, and are then flicked off—like a drop of water

from a grindstone—into the next lot. When you return, the coach says he
thinks "that will do for this morning" and enrolls your name in "Squad H."
The members of this squad—it's the largest—are told to report for practice
when they see their names in the "Crimson." All the others have been out
every day or so; but although I've read the "Crimson" carefully every
morning I haven't seen Squad H notified once.
I 've got so that I don't have to look at the printed schedule any more to
see the days and hours of my various lectures. I just go to the right one
when the bell rings as if I had been doing it all my life. In fact the college
world has settled down to a routine of lectures and recitations, pleasantly
broken by football games on Wednesdays and Saturdays, dining in town
now and then, and the theatre afterward. Come to think of it, I 've been to
the theatre rather oftener than "now and then." At home there are only two;
and the things we have there—except once in a long time—are pretty fierce.
But here there are about seven or eight big ones, and all sorts of continuous
performance places, dime museums and "nickelodeons" besides. You
simply have to go pretty often or you miss something good that everybody
's talking about. Berrisford goes every night.
I know now what Mr. Duggie meant when he said my allowance
would not be big enough. He said it was generous; there, however, I
disagree with him. I 'm not in the least extravagant, but papa does n't seem
to appreciate how many unexpected things happen that cost money. There
was my new overcoat, for instance. Berrisford was having one made, and I
realized when I saw him trying it on at the tailor's (it's a great, soft, loose
thing; the kind all the fellows are wearing now) that my old one wouldn't do
at all. In fact I had n't cared to put mine on, although the wind has been
pretty sharp once or twice on the way home from town late at night. The
tailor said that now was the time to get a coat like Berrisford's, as it would

be much more expensive later in the season; so I ordered one. In a certain
way it was real economy to do so. Then, I 've gone to town in the afternoon
several times with some of the fellows who are at our table and stayed at the
last moment to dinner and the theatre. I did n't have enough money with me
to do all this and was n't going to at first; but I found that the others did n't,
either, and expected to charge their dinners at the hotel. You can even
charge theatre tickets if you get them from an agent and pay fifty cents
more. It's very convenient. I bought a few pictures for my study—it looked
so bare (Berrisford has all sorts of queer, interesting prints and embroideries
on his walls that he brought back from abroad); and I simply had to get
some more chairs. For I had only one (the whirligig in front of the desk
doesn't count; it's too uncomfortable), which made it embarrassing when
four or five men dropped in. Then I had a dozen shirts made at a place just
off Tremont Street. The shirts mamma got me at home are very nice and all
that; but they're not the kind the fellows are wearing here. Everybody has
colored ones—pale pinks and blues, or white with a little stripe of
something running through them. Mine were all white. I really did n't need
more than six new ones, I suppose, but the man said they were cheaper by
the dozen. He showed me some really beautiful neckties that had arrived
that day from London. Against the materials I had picked out for the shirts
they were stunning, and as they weren't dear—considering the duty, the
originality of the designs and the heavy silks they were made of—I let him
send me five of them. There were the prettiest old pair of brass andirons and
a fender in the window of an "antique" shop on Beacon Street that I used to
stop and covet whenever I went into town. They were just the things for my
fireplace, which looked rather shabby—although comfortable. I didn't think
I could afford them at first; but one day when I happened to be passing

everything in the window was for sale at a discount of ten per cent. The
man was very kind and obliging and let me charge them.
They let you do that at all the shops, it seems; but I do think they might
have a little more decency about sending in their bills. The first of
November is three days off—and yet I 've heard from every cent I 've spent.
I don't quite know what to do about it, as my allowance—even when it
comes—won't be nearly enough to pay for everything; and of course I 'll
have to keep some of it for my board and washing and schoolbooks, and all
the other little expenses one can't very well steer clear of. Before going to
bed the last two nights I 've spent an hour or more in itemizing everything
and adding it all up, and then checking off the people who have to be paid
immediately, the ones who could wait a short time, and the ones about
whom there is no particular hurry. This makes the financial outlook a little
more possible, but not much. And yet Duggie had the nerve to say he
thought my allowance generous!
Another matter that I try not to think of is the fact that very soon we
are to be given what is called "hour examinations" in all our studies. I never
imagined they would come so—well, abruptly; when we began it seemed as
if we would take much longer to learn enough to be examined in. To tell the
truth—with the exception of my English course—I haven't become deeply
interested as yet in the lectures. After the first few times I gave up trying to
take notes; everything I wrote seemed so unimportant. And I haven't done
any of the reading, either. They expect you to do a lot of reading at home or
in the library, and hold you responsible for it in the examination. The man
Berrisford and I have in history is a dreamy old thing who goes into
thoughtful trances every now and then in the middle of a sentence, while
three hundred and fifty stylographic pens hang in mid-air waiting to

harpoon the next word. One day, after telling us to read a certain work on
the feudal system, he added in a kind of vague, helpless way,—
"We haven't the book in the library and I believe it is out of print, so I
don't think you will be able to buy it anywhere; but it's a singularly perfect
exposition of the subject and I strongly advise you all to read it." They say
he knows more about fen-drainage in the thirteenth century than any other
living person except one dreadfully old man in Germany who 's beginning
to forget about it.
We were instructed to make ourselves familiar with another work that
is in the library, and told that without a knowledge of it we could not expect
to accomplish much in the examination.
"I don't suppose many of you will read every word of it," the old man
said, "although it will do you a vast amount of good if you do." I privately
made up my mind to plough through the whole thing—even if it were in
two volumes; I thought it would please him. So, the other day as it was
raining and there was n't anything in particular going on, Berrisford
suggested that we run over to the library and glance through the book. We'd
never been in the library before and had to ask one of the pages at the
delivery desk where the history alcove was. He couldn't attend to us at first,
as there was an angry old gentleman with a very red face prancing up and
down in front of the desk exclaiming: "It's an outrage—an outrage! I shall
certainly speak to the President about this before the sun goes down upon
my wrath!" Several other pages were cowering behind the desk, and a
terrified librarian was murmuring: "I can have it here the first thing in the
morning, sir—the first thing; can you wait that long?"
"But I want it now!" the old gentleman declared; "I shall not wait until
the first thing in the morning. You 're preposterous. It's an outrage!" He was
so emphatic and peevish that some of the students in the big reading-room

pushed open the swinging doors and stuck their heads in to see what the
trouble was.
Well, Berrisford and I found out from the page that he is the greatest
philosopher of modern times. He had come in to get a book that hadn't been
asked for in fourteen years, and had just learned that it had been carted
away to the crypt of Appleton Chapel to make room for something that
seemed to be rather more universal in its appeal.
The page took us to the alcove we were looking for, and Berrisford
found our book almost immediately. My back was toward him when he
discovered it, and I turned around only because of his unusual and
prolonged silence. He was standing petrified in front of eighteen fat, dog-
eared volumes, with his big eyes blinking like an owl confronted by a
dazzling light.
"Is that it?" I inquired after a moment in a cold, hushed voice. By way
of answer he merely rolled his eyes and swallowed as if his throat were dry.
"It's a masterly little thing—isn't it?" he at length managed to say. Then
without further comment we removed the volumes from the shelf and piled
them on a table in the alcove. They almost covered it. When we had
finished, Berrisford, with a grim look about his under lip, opened one of
them and began to read. I did the same. It was just three o'clock. We read
for an hour without speaking or looking at each other, and at the end of that
time Berrisford took a pencil from his pocket and began to make
calculations on the back of a letter. At last he looked up as if to demand my
attention.
"I have read this book conscientiously—footnotes and everything—for
an hour," he said; he was deliberate and there was an air of finality in his
tone. "I find that I have completed five pages—the meaning of which has
since escaped me. Now, as there are four hundred pages in this volume and

as many, presumably, in every one of the other seventeen, it will take me
one thousand four hundred and forty hours—sixty days, or two months—to
'familiarize' myself with the whole set. If we sit here night and day for the
next two months without taking a second off to eat, sleep, or bathe, we shall
have glanced through this superficial pamphlet and pleased the old man."
"I think it has stopped raining," I replied.
We have a new inmate at our house. I woke up one morning hearing
such a strange, wild, sad little song coming from my study. At first I thought
I must have dreamed it, but even after I sat up in bed and knew I was
awake, the sound continued. It was the queerest, most barbaric little refrain,
all in a minor key with words I could n't make out, and was the sort of thing
one could imagine a "native" of some kind crooning to himself in the
middle of a rice-field. I listened to it awhile—almost afraid to go in; but
when it began to grow louder, and then was interrupted from time to time
by the most horrible gurgling and strangling noises, I jumped up and
opened my study door. At the same moment Berrisford and Mrs. Chester
appeared at the other door. In the middle of the room was a bristling brown
thing with pointed ears and muzzle and shrewd little eyes. It had absurdly
big feet and looked like a baby wolf. Something that seemed to be a piece
of leather was dangling from its mouth. Berrisford threw himself on the
floor, exclaiming: "My darling—my Saga—what is it—speak to me!" and
pulled gently at the piece of leather. The brute rolled his eyes, gagged a
little, and let him have it. "Why, it's the thumb of a glove," Berrisford said,
holding up his prize for us to look at, "and he dess tould n't eat it 'tause it
had a nassy tin button wivetted on uzzer end, so he tould n't," he added to
the animal.
"That doesn't seem to have stood in the way of his eating the other
one," I remarked coldly, for there was enough of the chewed thing in

Berrisford's hand to enable me to identify the remains of a pair of very
expensive gloves I had bought two days before.
"Heavens!—do you suppose he really did?" Berrisford asked in great
alarm. "Do you think it will hurt him?"
"Of course he ate it. I don't see it anywhere, and they were both
together on that chair. I hope it will hurt him," I said.
"It is n't like you, Wood, to talk that way about a poor, lonely, foreign
thing who 's never been in a house before in all his life," Berrisford
muttered resentfully.
"Well, he certainly do make the most outlandish sounds," Mrs. Chester
interposed.
"It isn't outlandish—it's Icelandic," Berrisford replied. "He came all
the way from Reikiavik on a Gloucester fishing-smack. I bought him at
Gloucester yesterday for a dollar—didn't I, my booful Saga; ess he did. And
he dess chewed all de checks often de trunks in dat nassy old baggage car
on de way up—didn't he, darlin'? And dat horrid baggage man was dess
crazy 'tause he did n't know where to put off any baggage and had to delay
de twain like evvysing." Berrisford became quite incoherent after this, so I
returned to my bedroom and slammed the door.
I don't think it's right for any one man to inflict a whole community
with a beast like Saga, and I 've told Berrisford so several times; but he
always says: "You seem to forget that I suffer as much, if not more, than
any one. Do you ever hear me complain when he wallows in the mud and
then snuggles up in my bed? Was there any outcry when he ate my gloves
and my patent leather shoes and my Russia leather notebook with hundreds
of exhaustive, priceless notes on the first part of 'Paradise Lost'? Did I make
a violent scene—the way you and Duggie do every day—when I gave the
tea for my sister and found him just before the people came—behind the

bathtub in a state of coma from having eaten thirty-six perfectly delicious
lettuce sandwiches? You might at least admit that you think he 's just as
distinguished and quaint-looking as he can be; because, of course, you do
think so. You know you love him to follow you through the Square—with
everybody turning to look—you know you do. Does n't he, mon tou-tou,
mon bébé, mon chien de race?"
One of the fellows at the table invited us to dine at his house in town
last Sunday evening. Berrisford was to meet me at a hotel in the Back Bay
at a quarter past seven and we were to go together. I took a long walk that
afternoon, and the air was so delicious and the autumn foliage in the
country so beautiful that I didn't realize how late it was until I looked at a
clock in a jeweller's window on the way back. I hurried to my room to
dress, and as I opened the front door my heart suddenly sank—for upstairs I
heard Saga chanting his terrible little refrain. We have all come to dread that
sound at our house, for it invariably means the loss of a cherished object to
somebody. Berrisford calls it the "Icelandic Hunger and Death Motif." I ran
upstairs and found Saga eating one of the tails of my dress-coat which I had
hung over the back of a chair in my study to get the creases out. He had
apparently first torn it off, then divided it into small pieces, and was
consuming them one by one as I came in. I was already late for dinner, and
as it was Sunday evening there was no one in town from whom I could
borrow another coat. For a moment I could n't decide whether to sit down
and cry or to commit Sagacide.

IV

Of course I went to the dinner—and what is more, I arrived almost on time.
I can't give myself any particular credit for this achievement, however, as it
was luck, pure and simple, that got me there. There is no doubt about it, I
am marvellously lucky; I seem to have a knack of falling on my feet, and
although Duggie has taken to worrying about my "shiftlessness" (as he is
pleased to call it) in money matters, and the calmness with which I regard
the approaching examinations and the academic side of college in general, I
have a feeling that everything will come out all right somehow.
It would sound heartless, I suppose, to speak as if I thought it fortunate
that Jerry Brooks had been stricken with appendicitis just in time to get me
into the dinner, if it were n't for the fact that he is recovering so splendidly.
(I went up to the hospital this afternoon to inquire.) But under the
circumstances it is hard not to look upon his sudden seizure rather
cheerfully—as I know he will enjoy hearing about it when he is well
enough to see people. I was in despair that evening when his roommate
came clattering up our tin steps and pounded on Berrisford's door; but the
instant I ran into the hall and saw him my heart gave a great throb of hope.
He had his dress clothes on; but he didn't look in the least like a person on
the way to dine in town—and I felt with indescribable relief that, if this
were the case, I could have his coat.
"Isn't Berrisford here? Has he gone?" he exclaimed excitedly. (I had
never seen him before—although I knew his chum, Brooks, slightly.) "We
were going to dine at the same house in town, but my roommate, Jerry
Brooks, got sick just as I was starting and I can't go, and two doctors have
taken him up to the hospital, and the Hemingtons haven't a telephone, and I
thought I'd let Berrisford know, for, of course——"
Well, his coat didn't fit me in a way to make a tailor expire with envy
exactly, but I was mighty glad to get it—and anyhow, I think people are

inclined to take a dress-suit for granted. Berrisford attached no importance
whatever to the fact that his beast had ruined my coat, but merely said
reproachfully: "I hope you let him have the pieces to play with; he 'll be so
lonely this evening with no one in the house except Mrs. Chester."
I have mentioned the fact that of late Duggie has given intimations of
having me "on his mind." Of course when a man like Duggie finds time to
care one way or the other about what he thinks you ought to do, it's a great
honor. He is the busiest, hardest worked, and most influential person I ever
knew. He belongs to no end of clubs, and besides being captain of the team
he's at the head of a lot of other college things. Almost every day there's a
reporter or two lying in wait for him out here to ask about the team, and
whether he approves of the athletic committee's latest mandate, and what he
thinks about all sorts of things in regard to which he hasn't any opinion
whatever—and would n't express it even if he had. Besides all this he
manages in some way to study awfully hard and to get high marks in
everything he takes. Furthermore, he's in training most of the year, and just
now he has to go to bed every night except Saturday at half-past nine or ten.
He's almost always amiable and kind to people, and I think he's great. I can't
help liking the fact that he drops into my room and sits down and talks the
way he does. Some of the fellows at our table found him there the other day
and were scared to death. But at the same time I have a feeling that he does
n't think Berrisford and I are just what we ought to be. As if people could be
different from the way they 're made! I know that sometimes he would like
to say things that, after all, he never quite does.
Of Berrisford, I 'm sure, he doesn't approve at all. I don't, of course,
believe for a moment that he was anything but amused at the way
Berrisford conjugated the French verb for him the other day; but as it is the

sort of thing that Berri takes an uncontrollable joy in doing, I think Duggie
has an idea that he is n't good for anything else.
Duggie—I can't imagine why—has never studied French until this
year. He enrolled in a class only a week or so ago, and though it's merely an
extra course with him and he could get his degree just as easily without it,
he goes at it as if it were all-important. Berrisford knows French as well as
he knows English, and volunteered to help him with his exercises. The other
afternoon Duggie ran into Berri's room and said: "I 've an idea that we're
going to have 'je suis bon' in French to-day; I wish you would write out a
few tenses for me so I can learn them on the way over—I simply have n't
had a minute to myself for two days." Naturally Berrisford seemed
delighted to help him, and gravely wrote something on a piece of paper that
Duggie carried off just as the bell was ringing. When he got into the Yard
and slowed up to look at it, this is what he found:

Je suis bon
Tu es bones
Il est beans
Nous sommes bonbons
Vous êtes bonbonniéres
Ils sont bon-ton.

Of course he did n't actually care; but I don't think the incident helped in
Duggie's opinion to throw any very dazzling light on Berrisford's really
serious qualities. Duggie regarded it, I 'm sure, as about on a par with the
way we get out of sitting through our history lecture.

One day when the dreamy old gentleman who conducts the history
course was trying to prove that Charlemagne either was or was n't surprised
(I 've forgotten which) when the Pope suddenly produced a crown and stuck
it on his head, a ripple of mirth swept gently across the room, very much as
a light breeze ruffles the surface of a wheatfield. No one laughed out loud;
but when between three and four hundred men all smile at once, it makes a
curious little disturbance I can't quite describe. The old gentleman looked
up from his notes, took off his spectacles, chose one of the other pairs lying
on the desk in front of him (he has three or four kinds that he uses for
different distances), and inspected the room. But by the time he had got
himself properly focused there was nothing to see; the fellow who had
made every one giggle by climbing out of the window and down the fire-
escape was probably a block away. So, after a troubled, inquiring look from
side to side, the dear old man changed his spectacles again and went on
with the lecture.
Now, although it had never occurred to any one to crawl down the fire-
escape until that day, every one in our part of the room has become
infatuated with the idea, and three times a week—shortly after half-past two
—there is a continuous stream of men backing out the window, down the
iron ladder and into the Yard. In fact, the struggle to escape became so
universal and there were so many scraps at the window and in mid-air on
the way down over who should go first, that Berrisford evolved the idea of
distributing numbers the way they do in barbershops on Saturday afternoon
when everybody in the world becomes inspired with the desire to be shaved
at the same time. It works beautifully; but of late the undertaking is
attended by considerable risk.
At first Professor Kinde stopped lecturing and fumbled for his other
spectacles only when he heard the class titter; I don't believe he in the least

knew what was going on. But recently he has become extremely foxy.
Although he has n't spoken of the matter, he realizes what is happening, and
I think the ambition of his declining years is to catch somebody in the act of
darting toward the window. At irregular intervals now, throughout his
lectures, he—apropos of nothing—drops his notes, seizes a fresh pair of
spectacles, makes a lightning change, and then peeks craftily about the
room while the class tries hard not to hurt his feelings by laughing. Then,
disappointed, but with an air of "I 'll-surely-strike-it-right-next-time," he
changes back again and continues. The lectures have become so exciting
and fragmentary that Berrisford and I are torn with the conflicting desires to
stay and see what happens and to get out into the wonderful autumn
weather. Usually, however, we leave, and the last time, just as I was
preparing to drop to the ground, Duggie strode in sight. Berrisford, half-
way down, happened to glance over his shoulder. When he saw Duggie he
swung around, struck an Alexandre Dumas attitude, and exclaimed
dramatically,—
"Sire, we have liberated the prisoners, cut away the portcullis and fired
the powder magazine. Is 't well?" Duggie laughed.
"Powder magazines aren't the only things that get fired around these
parts, monsieur," he answered as he passed on.
Now, there was nothing disagreeable either in the remark or the way
Duggie made it; he seemed perfectly good-natured, and, although in a great
hurry, very much amused. But, somehow, it was n't quite as if any one else
had said it. I don't know what "reading between the lines" is called when
there aren't any lines to read between; but anyhow that's what I couldn't
help doing. Duggie's little thrust was made at Berri—but it was intended for
me. And that 's what I mean when I say Duggie has me on his mind. He
would have Berri there, too, if he liked him; but he does n't. I think he

firmly believes that he regards us both with the utmost impartiality; yet I
know (this is recorded in all modesty, merely as a fact) that he likes me, and
that for poor Berri he has no use at all. Berrisford is tactless; he had no
business, for instance, to tell Duggie about the watch.
One Saturday morning when Berrisford had finished his lectures for
the day, and I found that a cut was to be given in my last one, we strolled
along Massachusetts Avenue, without really meaning to go anywhere, until
we came to the bridge across the Back Bay. We leaned over the rail awhile
and watched the tide clutching viciously at the piers as it swirled out, and
then, farther up, I noticed a flock of ducks paddling about in a most
delightful little mud-hole left by the falling tide.
"I could hit one of those birdies if I had a shotgun," I said, closing one
eye. (It just shows what a trivial remark may sometimes lead one into.)
"It wouldn't do you any good," Berrisford yawned; "you couldn't get
it."
"I don't see why not. I could borrow a boat from the Humane Society
and row out," I answered, rather irritated by Berrisford's languid scepticism.
"Well, what on earth would you do with the poor little beast after you
did get him?" he pursued.
"What do you suppose?" I exclaimed. "What do people usually do
when they shoot a duck?"
"I think they usually say that they really hit two, but that the other one
managed to crawl into a dense patch of wild rice growing near by,"
Berrisford answered.
"I should have it cooked and then I 'd eat it," I said, ignoring his
remark.
"What an extremely piggish performance! There would not be enough
for any one but yourself. I would much rather go into town with somebody

and have one apiece at the Touraine."
"Oh, Berrisford," I murmured; "this is so sudden!"
When we reached the other side of the bridge we got on a passing car,
and after we sat down Berrisford said, "You 'll have to pay for me; I have n't
any money either here or in Cambridge." As I had just eight cents in the
world and had taken it for granted that Berri was going to pay for me, we
jumped out before the conductor came around, and resumed our walk.
"If you have n't any money and I haven't any money, I 'm inclined to
think the ducks will not fly well to-day," I mused; for the last time we had
been to the Touraine the head waiter—a most tiresome person—told me we
could n't charge anything more there until we paid our bills.
"I suppose you would just sit on the curbstone and starve," Berrisford
sniffed. And as we walked along I saw that he had some kind of a plan. He
took me through one of the queer little alleys with which Boston is
honeycombed and out into a noisy, narrow, foreign-looking street, lined
with shabby second-hand stores and snuffy restaurants,—the kind that have
red tablecloths. At first I thought it was Berri's intention to get luncheon in
one of these places, although I did n't see how even he could manage it very
well on eight cents. However, I asked no questions. Suddenly he stopped
and took off his sleeve-links. Then we walked on a few steps and went into
a pawnbroker's.
It sounds absurd, but when I discovered what Berrisford was about to
do I felt curiously excited and embarrassed. Of course I knew that lots of
people pawn things, but I had never seen it done before, and like most of
the things you can think about and read about in cold blood, I found that it
made my heart beat a good deal faster actually to do it. In fact, I did n't care
to do it at all, and told Berrisford so in an undertone; but he said,—

"Why not? There 's nothing wrong in it. You own something more or
less valuable and you happen for the moment to need something else; why
should n't you exchange them? If the soiled vampire who runs this place
(what's become of him, anyhow?) would give me two small roasted ducks
and some bread and butter and currant jelly and two little cups of coffee and
a waiter to serve them, and a mediæval banquet hall to eat them in, and a
perfectly awful orchestra behind a thicket of imitation palm-trees to play
Hungarian rhapsodies while we ate—instead of five dollars and a half, I
should be just as well pleased; because it will amount to about the same
thing in the end."
Just then the proprietor of the shop emerged from behind a mound of
trousers and overcoats and shuffled toward us very unwillingly, it seemed to
me. But Berrisford said he was always like that.
"You can't expect a display of pleasing emotions for a paltry five per
cent a month," Berrisford whispered in my ear. I don't think, however, that
the pawnbroker could have looked pleasant no matter what per cent he got.
He took Berri's beautiful sleeve-links (they 're made of four antique
Japanese gold pieces), went into a sort of glass cage built around a high
desk and a safe, and did all sorts of queer things to them. He scratched the
under side of two of the coins with a small file; then he dabbed some kind
of a liquid that he got out of a tiny bottle on the rough places and examined
them through one of those inane spool things that jewellers hang on their
eyeballs just before telling you that you 've busted your mainspring. Next he
weighed them in a pair of scales that he fished out of a drawer in the desk,
and finally he held up his claw of a hand with all the fingers distended, for
us to inspect through the glass.
"Why, you dreadful old man!" Berrisford exclaimed indignantly. "You
gave me five and a half last time. I wouldn't think of taking less."

For a moment I supposed that the game was up and we 'd have to walk
all the way back to Cambridge and be too late for luncheon when we got
there; for Berrisford took his sleeve-links and strolled over to the door,
saying in a loud voice,—
"Come on, Tommy; there 's a better one across the street." But just as
we were leaving, "the soiled vampire" made a guttural sound that Berrisford
seemed to understand, and we went back and got the amount Berri
considered himself entitled to.
"The quality of mercy is a little strained this morning," he said when
Mr. Hirsch went into the glass cage again to make out the ticket. I always
had an idea that a pawn ticket was a piece of blue cardboard—something
like a return theatre ticket. But it is n't, at all. It's simply a thin slip of paper
resembling a check—only smaller.
Well, we had a delightful luncheon. After luncheon we thought of
going to the matinée and sitting in the gallery, but Berri all at once
exclaimed, as if the idea were a sort of inspiration,—
"I 'll tell you what we 'll do; let 's economize. I 've always wanted to;
they say you can be awfully nice and contented if you never spend a cent,
but just think noble thoughts."
"We might go and look at the pictures in the Public Library and then
cross over to the Art Museum," I suggested. "It's free on Saturdays, you
know." Berri thought that would be charming, so we walked up Boylston
Street, stopping at a florist's on the way to send some American beauties
and some violets to Mrs. Hemington, at whose house we dined that Sunday
night. (She was thrown out of a carriage the other day and sprained her
thumb, and we thought we ought to take some notice of it, as she was very
nice about asking us to come to Sunday luncheon whenever we wanted to.)

Berrisford did n't care much for the Puvis de Chavannes pictures in the
library,—that is, after he found out that they were as finished as they were
ever going to be. At first he was inclined to think them rather promising,
and said that by the time they got the second and third coats of paint on they
would no doubt do very nicely.
"But the artist is dead," I explained. "And anyhow, he always painted
like that."
"Why did n't some one speak to him about it?" said Berri.
"There would n't have been any use; he painted that way on purpose. It
was his style—his individuality," I said.
"Do you like it?" he suddenly demanded. He was looking at me very
intently, and I did n't know just what to say; for although I 've gone to see
the pictures several times, it never occurred to me to ask myself whether I
really liked them or not. I supposed—as every one says they are so fine—
that I did.
"I don't mean do you know how much they cost, or what people said
about them in the backs of magazines when they were first put up. What I
want to know is— Does looking at them give you great pleasure?"
"I think they 're simply preposterous," I said; and then we went
outdoors again and over to the Art Museum.
We spent the rest of the afternoon there, sitting in front of a painting by
Turner called The Slave Ship, and listening to what the people who passed
by said about it. I did n't think there was very much to it—it's merely some
small, dark brown legs in a storm at sea with a fire burning. But the people
who came to look at it murmured all sorts of things in low, sad voices, and
several of them read long extracts from a book that Berri said was by
Ruskin. When I asked him how he knew, he answered that it could n't well

be by any one else. (A great many people say that Berri's a fool, but I think
he knows an awful lot.)
It makes one tired and hungry to criticise pictures all afternoon, and
when we left the gallery Berri sat down on the steps and said he could never
walk all the way to Cambridge in his exhausted condition; so once more we
found ourselves confronted by famine.
Now, if mamma were only here I know I could explain everything to
her, and she would n't think me so lacking in respect for my ancestors—so
utterly lost—as she evidently does. But until she gets my letter (and perhaps
even afterward) she will be unhappy over the crude, unqualified fact that I
pawned my watch.
It belonged to my great-grandfather and is a fine old thing with a
wreath of gold and platinum roses on its round gold face. I got twenty-five
dollars on it. Nobody but Berri would have known, and there would n't have
been the least fuss if Uncle Peter had n't come to town.
He was in Boston on business and appeared in my room one afternoon
a few days afterward. I was ever so glad to see somebody from home, and I
introduced him to Berri, who helped me show him the gym and Soldiers'
Field and the glass flowers and pretty much everything open to visitors. He
had a lovely time and asked us to dinner in the evening.
We had a pleasant dinner—only Uncle Peter kept glancing at his watch
every few minutes (he was leaving on an early train). Finally he said: "What
time is it, Tommy? I 'm afraid I 'm slow."
From force of habit I felt for my watch, and then, I suppose, I must
have looked queer, for Berrisford began to chuckle, and Uncle Peter, after a
moment of mystification, jumped hastily to a conclusion that, I am sorry to
say, happened to be correct. He rubbed it in all through dinner and on the
way to the station, and I suppose when he reached home he told mamma the

first thing. For the evening of the day he arrived I got a telegram from
mamma that said: "Redeem watch immediately. Keep this from your father;
it would kill him."
Of course Berri had to elaborate the thing in his best style and keep
Duggie awake for half an hour while he told him about it.
"I made it very graphic," he said to me gloomily, "but somehow or
other it didn't seem to take."

V

The crash has come, and the Dean and my adviser, two or three instructors,
some of the fellows at the table, and even Berrisford (this last is a little too
much), have all taken occasion to inform me regretfully that they foresaw it
from the first. This is the sort of thing that makes a man bitter. How did I
know what was ahead of me? If they all realized so well that I was going to
flunk the hour exams, why did n't they let me know then? It might have
done some good if they had told me three weeks ago that they thought me
stupid; but I fail to see the point of their giving me to understand at this
stage of the game that they themselves all along have been so awfully
clever. Yet, that's just what they've done; all except Duggie. And strangely
enough it was Duggie that I most dreaded. As a matter of fact he has
scarcely mentioned the subject. When I went into his room one night and
stood around for a while without knowing how to begin and finally came
out with,—
"Well, I suppose Berri 's told you that I didn't get through a single
exam?"—he merely said,—

"That 's tough luck; I 'm darned sorry;" and then after a moment he
added: "Oh, well, there 'll be some more coming along in February; it is n't
as if they were n't going to let you have another whack at things."
"Of course I know it is n't my last chance," I answered drearily; "but I
can't help feeling that the fact of its being my first makes it almost as bad. It
starts me all wrong in the opinion of the Dean and my adviser and the
college generally." Somehow I could n't bring myself to tell Duggie what I
thought, and what, in a measure, I still think—namely, that the marks I got
were most unjust. There 's something about Duggie—I don't know what it is
exactly—that always makes you try to take the tone, when you 're telling
him anything, that you feel he would take if he were telling the same thing
to you. This sounds rather complicated, but what I mean, for instance, is
that if he got E in all his exams and thought the instructors had been unjust,
he would probably go and have it out with them, but he would n't complain
to any one else. Of course it 's simply nonsense even to pretend, for the sake
of argument, that Duggie could flunk in anything; but, anyhow, that 's what
I mean.
However, I did n't have the same hesitation in saying to Berrisford that
I considered myself pretty badly treated.
"I know, of course, that I didn't write clever papers," I told him, "but I
at least wrote long ones. They ought to give me some credit for that; enough
to squeeze through on, anyhow." Berri agreed with me perfectly that all the
instructors were unjust, yet at the same time he said, with a peculiarly
irritating, judicial manner that he sometimes assumes when you least expect
it,—
"But I can understand—I can understand. It's most unfortunate—but it
's very human—very natural. As long as we employ this primitive,
inadequate method of determining the amount of a man's knowledge, we

must expect to collide every now and then with the personal equation." This
sounded like a new superintendent addressing the village school board for
the first time, but I did n't say anything, as I knew there was something
behind it that Berri did n't care just then to make more clear. Berri has
exceedingly definite ideas about things, but he "aims to please;" he finds it
hard to express himself and at the same time to make everything come out
pleasantly in the end.
"What you say is no doubt important and true," I answered; "but I don't
know what it means."
"Why, I simply mean that in thinking the matter over one can't get
around the fact that ever since college opened you 've been—what shall I
say? People have been more aware of you than your size would seem to
justify; you 've been, as it were, a cinder in the public eye." Berrisford
stopped abruptly, and for a moment looked sort of aghast.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," he exclaimed, more in his natural tone; "I had
n't any idea it was coming out that way; that's the trouble with metaphors."
"I don't see how I 've been more of a cinder than any one else—than
you've been, for instance," I objected. "I 've seen more of you than I 've
seen of any one, and I 've been seen more with you," I added.
"That's the frightful injustice of it," Berrisford put in triumphantly.
"That's what I 'm trying to get at." (I don't believe he was at all, but I let him
continue.) "We 've always done about the same things—but fate has
ordained that in every instance you were to leave your impress upon the
wax of hostile opinion, while I was as the house of sand, effaced by
Neptune's briny hand. (Doesn't that last sound exactly like Pope at his
worst?) You see, you got yourself arrested at the very beginning of things.
Of course, socially speaking, it was a brilliant move; it simply made you.
But on the other hand, I don't think it helped very much to—to—well, to

bring you thoroughly in touch with the Faculty; and one has to look out for
that. Then, you know, of all the hundreds that swarmed down the fire-
escape during Professor Kinde's lectures, you were the only one who had
the misfortune to be caught. This naturally made the fire-escape impossible
from then on, and once more turned the garish light of publicity upon you.
And to cap all—you were inspired to give Mr. Much the fine arts book.
Why, my dear child, your name is a household word!"
The incident of the fine arts book, I confess, was enough to make a
man just give up and turn cynical.
Mr. Much is a Boston architect who comes out from town twice a
week to lecture on ancient art. They think a great deal of him in Boston. He
stands at the head of his profession there, because, as he's never built
anything, even the most critical have no grounds for complaint. Berri says
there are lots of people like that in Boston,—painters and writers and
musicians who are really very great, but think it more refined just to "live"
their works. He meets them at his aunt's house, where they often gather to
talk it all over. Well, at the first lecture Much told us to buy and read
carefully a certain treatise on ancient art and always bring it to the lectures,
as he would refer to it frequently. I acted on his advice to the extent of
examining the book in the co-operative store one day; but it was large and
heavy and the illustrations were rather old-fashioned, and it cost two
dollars, so I decided I could get along without it. Most of the fellows did the
same thing, and the impulsive few who actually bought it got tired after a
while of lugging it to the lectures, as Much did n't show any intention of
ever referring to it.
One morning as I was strolling over to hear him tell about the
influence of Greek something or other on something else, and the
deplorable decadence it had undergone later at the hands of the Romans,

Hemington darted out of a bookstore in the Square and said: "If you 're
going to Fine Arts, just take this book and give it to Bertie Stockbridge."
(Bertie is his roommate.) "I 'm going to cut; I have to meet my father in
town." I took the book and pursued my way.
Now, that morning, for the first time, Much, after lecturing for about
half an hour, surprised every one by breaking off abruptly and saying,—
"There's a very helpful note on page eighteen of Geschmitzenmenger's
Ancient Art that I wish you would all turn to." Then after a moment he
added: "As some of us may have failed to bring the book this morning, I
think I shall read the note in question aloud." He came to the edge of the
platform and with a solicitous smile held out his hand; but no one in the
front row had a book to lend him. His smile changed to an expression of
mild disgust, and he glanced along the second row of seats. No one
responded, however, and he swept the room with a look of annoyance,
exclaiming, "Come—come," and snapping his fingers impatiently. Just then
the fellow next to me murmured: "Will any lady or gentleman in the
audience kindly lend me a high hat, three rabbits, and a dozen fresh eggs?"
and I laughed. And as I laughed, I leaned over to hide my face—and there
on my lap was Geschmitzenmenger's Ancient Art; after Hemington had
given it to me I was so interested in whether he would catch his car or not
that I had never looked at it at all.
"Is it possible that no one has provided himself with the book I
requested you to procure?" Mr. Much was asking incredulously. I saw my
chance to make a hit, and after a moment of impressive silence I arose and
walked to the platform. There was a gust of dumfounded laughter, followed
by prolonged applause. As I went back to my seat all the fellows who could
reach me insisted on patting me on the back and grasping me by the hand. It
was most embarrassing. But the really sickening part of it was to come.

Mr. Much made a little speech about me, saying, "I am glad that there
is at least one, etc., etc., etc.," and when he had finished he opened the book
with a flourish and found, as was quite natural, that none of the leaves had
been cut. I suppose this was in the nature of a last straw, for he simply stood
there a minute, fingering the pages helplessly and smiling the pitiful,
philosophic smile of one who has lived long enough to have had even his
most conservative illusions dispelled; then he turned the book around and
held it open for every one to howl at, and finally he dismissed us with a
hopeless gesture that expressed the unutterable. Whereupon I was seized by
strong, willing hands and borne aloft all over the Yard, followed by the
whole class hooting and jeering.
It was this that led Berri to say that my name had become a household
word.
"You see," Berri went on, "when an instructor reads my examination
book, for instance, the signature of the writer conveys nothing to him; but
when he strikes yours—he stops and exclaims, 'Where have I seen that
name before?' Then he sharpens his pencil to its finest possible point and
gives you E."
"But you do agree with me that it's terribly unjust?" I asked him; for
that, after all, seemed to be the main thing.
"Why, of course it's unjust," Berrisford answered decidedly. "It 's one
of the worst cases that has ever come to my notice."
It did n't occur to me until afterward that, as these were our first
examinations, Berrisford's "notice" had not been particularly extensive. For
I felt so badly about the whole thing that it was agreeable to know that an
intelligent person like Berrisford believed I had been shabbily treated. It
was his moral support, I think, that gave me nerve enough to complain to
my adviser.

My adviser is a young man and seems like an appreciative, well-
disposed sort of person (he offered me a cigar after I had sat down in his
study), so I did n't have any difficulty in telling him right off what I had
come for.
"I 've heard from my hour examinations," I said, "and I find that I have
been given E in all of them." (I was careful not to say that I had failed or
flunked, or had n't passed, as that was not the impression I wished to
convey.)
"We have met the enemy and we are theirs," he answered pleasantly.
"Yes, I heard about that," he went on, "and I hoped you would come in to
see me." Then he waited awhile—until the clock began to get noisy—and at
last he glanced up and said,—
"What was it doing when you came in? It looked like snow this
afternoon." But I had n't gone there to discuss meteorology, so I ignored his
remark.
"I can scarcely think I could have failed in everything," I suggested.
"It is somewhat incredible, isn't it?" the young man murmured.
"I never stopped writing from the time an examination began until it
stopped," I said.
"What did you think it was—a strength test?" he asked brutally.
"I told all I knew."
"Yes," he acknowledged; "your instructors were convinced of that."
"And I don't think I got enough credit for it. If I had the books here, I
feel sure I could make this plain."
"Well, let 's look them over," he answered readily; and much to my
astonishment he went to his desk and brought back all my blue-books.
I confess I had n't expected anything quite so definite as this, but I tried
to appear as if I had hoped that it was just what might happen. We sat down

side by side and read aloud—first an examination question (he had provided
himself with a full set of the papers) and then my answer to it.
"'Explain polarized light,'" he read.
"'The subject of polarized light, as I understand it, is not very well
understood,'" I began; at which my adviser put his hands to his head and
rocked to and fro.
"If you don't mind," I said, "I think I'd rather begin on one of the
others; this physics course is merely to make up a condition, and perhaps I
've not devoted very much time to it; it isn't a fair test." So we took up the
history paper and read the first question, which was: "What was the
Lombard League?" My answer I considered rather neat, for I had written:
"The Lombard League was a coalition formed by the Lombards." I paused
after reading it and glanced at my adviser.
"It was a simple question, and I gave it a simple answer," I murmured.
"I 'm afraid you depreciate yourself, Mr. Wood," he replied. "Your use
of the word 'coalition' is masterly."
"But what more could I have said?" I protested.
"I don't think you could have said anything more," he answered
inscrutably.
I read on and on, and he interrupted me only twice—once in the
philosophy course to point out politely that what I constantly referred to as
"Hobbe's Octopus" ought to be "Hobbe's Leviathan," and once in the
questions in English Literature, to explain that somebody or other's
"Apologia Pro Vita Sua" was not—as I had translated it—"an apology for
living in a sewer." (I could have killed Berrisford for that—and it sounded
so plausible, too; for any one who lived in a sewer would naturally
apologize.) He let me proceed, and after a time I could n't even bring myself
to stop and contest the decisions as I had done at first; for I dreaded the way

he had of making my most serious remarks sound rather childish. So I
rattled on, faster and faster, until I found myself mumbling in a low tone,
without pronouncing half the words; and then I suddenly stopped and put
the blue-book on the table and stared across the room at the wall. He did n't
express any surprise, which, on the whole, was very decent of him, and
after a minute or two of silence, during which he gathered up the evidence
and put it back in his desk, we began to talk football and our chances of
winning the big game. He said some nice things about Duggie, and hoped
the rumor that he was overtrained was n't true. I told him that I lived in the
same house with Duggie and knew him very well, and feared it was true.
He seemed glad that I knew Duggie. I stayed for about fifteen minutes so as
not to seem abrupt or angry at the way my visit had turned out, and then
left. We did n't refer to the exams again, so I don't see exactly how I can
ever right the wrong they have done me. If my adviser were a different kind
of man, I could have managed it, I think.
I have n't seen very much of the fellows lately, except, of course, at
meals—that is to say, at luncheon and dinner, for I can't stand their
comments at breakfast. They greet me with "Hello, old man—what's this I
hear about your trying for the Phi Beta Kappa?" "Is it true that you're going
to get your degree in three years?" "I should n't go in for a summa cum if I
were you; a magna is just as good;" and all that sort of thing. They
evidently find it very humorous, for it never fails to make them all laugh. I
've taken to breakfasting at The Holly Tree, as I don't often meet any one I
know there. I did one morning, however, come across the little instructor
who had charge of the Freshman registration and made quavering remarks
at me in a kind of Elizabethan dialect. He's a most extraordinary person. As
he does n't say more than half he means, and as I don't understand more

than half he says, I find conversation with him very exhausting. But I like
him, somehow.
I was reading a newspaper when he came in and did n't realize that he
was standing near me until I heard a slow, tremulous, reproachful voice
saying,—
"Who's been sitting in my chair?" It seems that he always has his
breakfast at the same table in the chair that I, in my ignorance, had taken. I
jumped up, of course, and after he had sat down and leaned back, he
murmured feebly, "I 'm an old man; but I know my place." I did n't know
why he said this, as he is n't an old man at all; he can't be more than thirty-
six or thirty-seven.
"I'm a young man, but I seem to know your place, too," I laughed, as I
looked around for another chair.
"You clever boys chaff me so," he replied mournfully. "You mustn't
chaff me; I'm only a simple villager." Just then the waitress appeared at a
hole in the buff-colored fence that deludes itself into thinking it
differentiates the kitchen from the dining-room, and the little man pounded
softly and gently on the table, exclaiming,—
"What ho—Katy; some sack—some sack!" A request that Katy
evidently understood better than I did, for she withdrew and came back in a
moment with a cup of tea.
"How now, Sir John—is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet
wench?" the instructor inquired of me; which caused Katy—who had
lingered to hear what we wanted for breakfast—to twist a corner of her
apron around her finger and gurgle ecstatically,—
"Now, Mr. Fleetwood, you stop."
We sat there talking for more than an hour, and I don't know when I 've
had so improving a conversation. We talked mostly about books and plays.

Mr. Fleetwood seems to care a great deal about both and discussed them
differently from the way most people do. At our table at Mrs. Brown's, for
instance, a book or a play is always either "rotten" or a "corker." But
Fleetwood has no end of things to tell about them. He seems to know all the
people who do the writing and acting, and remembers all the clever remarks
they 've made to him at various times, and the even cleverer ones he made
in reply. Finally, when I got up to go he relapsed suddenly into his more
doleful manner and said,—
"You will come to my Wednesday Evenings—won't you?" I felt as if I
ought to have known what they were; but I 'd never heard of them, so I
suppose I looked mystified.
"The lions roar at my Wednesday Evenings," he explained, turning on
the tremolo in his voice, "but they won't hurt you—because they like me.
They 'll like you, too, if you 'll come." I said I should like to come very
much.
"When do you have your Wednesday Evenings?" I asked; for he was
so dreadfully vague. He looked at me vacantly and then stared at the ceiling
awhile, as if trying to think.
"On Wednesday evenings," he at last petulantly quavered; and I left,
for I began to think I was losing my mind.
With the exception of Fleetwood that morning I have n't met any one
else I know at The Holly Tree. To tell the truth, I haven't been very sociable
of late. The result of the exams was rather depressing, and besides—I can't
help realizing that solitude is inexpensive, if nothing else. I don't like to go
in town unless I can pay my share, and, as I have n't been able as yet even
to get my watch out of hock, in spite of mamma's urgent telegram, I don't
see my way to going to the theatre and eating around at expensive hotels.
Of course I could have the tickets charged—but they 're the least of it. And

anyhow I owe so much already I hate to make it worse. Berri advised me to
pawn the old-fashioned fob that belongs to my watch and get the watch
back. (The fob has a huge topaz or some such thing in it that ought to bring
a lot.) But I 'm tired of disposing of heirlooms.
I went to the first Symphony in Sanders' Theatre the other night.
Duggie gave me his ticket, as the head coach, and the doctor who looks
after the team told him he was n't feeling well and made him go to bed
instead. It was a wonderful concert, and I enjoyed it very much, although I
could n't help wondering all the time why I was enjoying it; for a man who
looked like a Skye terrier played beautiful, sad things on the 'cello until I
felt so lonely and homesick and as if I had wasted my life and broken my
mother's heart, that I began to sniff; and the lady who was sitting next to me
(she had a huge music book on her lap and was following every note with
her finger and swaying from side to side like a cobra) turned and glared at
me.
On Saturday afternoon they would n't let Duggie play in the game, and
advised him to go home for Sunday. He came into my room where I was
sitting by the fire feeling pretty blue, and after talking awhile said he
wanted me to go with him. Berrisford came in while I was getting ready,
and when he saw how little I was taking with me he exclaimed: "Good
Heavens, man—you can't go that way! Duggie wouldn't mind, and neither
would his family; but you must show some consideration for the servants.
And you 'd better take a piece of bread in your pocket, to munch when
nobody 's looking, as you 'll get there too late for tea, and they don't dine
until sometime during the middle of the night." He made me pack my dress-
clothes (they've been mended) and gave me his hairbrushes, as they have
ivory backs with black monograms on them. I can't feel thankful enough

that he warned me in time; for everything turned out just as he said. (Berri
is clever; there's no getting around it.)
I can't write about my visit to-night; it's too late to do justice to the
novel and delightful time I had. I enjoyed every minute of it; even the thing
that Duggie told me on Sunday morning did n't spoil it. (Berri said he
probably took me home with him in order to break the news gently.)
We had been sitting on the rocks in the sun, looking out to sea and
listening to the lazy waves break over the beach about half a mile away (at
that distance they looked like a flock of sheep playing on the sand), when
Duggie told me in as nice a way as one possibly can tell disagreeable news
that the Administrative Board had decided to put me on probation.

VI

It's curious how little you know, after all, about the fellows here of whom
you know most. As time goes on I suppose you gradually learn more—
although I 've been told by upperclassmen that they 've seen certain fellows
every day for years, and, while apparently intimate with them, have never
taken the trouble to find out their real names—their first names, that is to
say. And as for knowing what their families are like—what they 've been
used to before they came to college—you can only guess; and you usually
guess wrong. At least, I do. Berrisford, however, is very wonderful. He has
a mind as comprehensive in its scope as the last seventy-five pages of an
unabridged dictionary, and his talent for sizing people up and telling you all
about them is really remarkable. He is the last person in the world, though,
that I should have picked out as a citizen of Salem, and one day I told him

so. He explained himself by saying that his mother had made an unfortunate
marriage. I felt very sorry, as the only time I saw his mother I thought her
lovely.
"He was very handsome and had a great deal of money, and was the
best and most delightful man I ever knew," Berri went on.
"Well, I don't see anything so dreadfully unfortunate in all that," I
ventured.
"Ah, but he was n't from Salem," Berri explained simply. "He didn't
even have any cousins there, although for a time mamma's family tried to
delude themselves into believing they were on the track of some. They
traced him back to Humphrey de Bohun and Elizabeth Plantagenet, but
there they lost the scent; and as mamma's people—perhaps you know—
came from the King of Navarre and Urracca, Heiress of Arragon, why—of
course—well, you know how people talk. It was all very sad. Naturally
mamma never cared to live in Salem after that, and I think my grandparents
were rather relieved that she preferred to stay most of the time in France.
They used to come over and see us every few years, but of course no one in
Salem ever knew about that; every one believed that grandfather had to take
a cure at Carlsbad—at least that was what was given out whenever he went
abroad. I suppose I can't help seeming somewhat crude now and then," he
mused dismally; "dilute the strain and it's bound to show sooner or later.
But there—I don't know why I've told you all this; it is n't the sort of thing
one can discuss with everybody."
"All this" was intensely interesting and mysterious to me, but I don't
think I can ever get on to it entirely; just when I 'm beginning to feel that I
've mastered the details I collide with a perfectly new phase and find I don't
know anything at all. My ignorance has led to several discussions with
Berri—the heated kind that always result in coldness. When I told him, for

instance, that I 'd met Billy in town one morning and he 'd taken me home
for luncheon, Berri said, "How nice," and proceeded to effect a union of his
eyebrows and the top of his head.
"Now what on earth is the matter with Billy?" I exclaimed indignantly,
for I 'd enjoyed my luncheon exceedingly, and the house was the biggest
thing I had ever seen.
"Oh, Billy 's all right. He 's really very nice, I imagine—although, of
course, I don't know him very well," said Berri. "Why do you ask?"
"Who wouldn't ask when you hang your eyebrows on your front hair
that way at the mere mention of his name?" I demanded. "Why do you say
'of course,' and why do you always make a point of the fact that you don't
know him well? Who cares whether you do or not?" I pursued, for I wanted
to clear this mystery up once and for all.
"Well, you seem to care a good deal," Berrisford laughed.
"Oh, not personally," I assured him, "only in the interest of science."
We squabbled for an hour, and at the end of that time I had discovered
that (1) Billy's family spell their name with an e—a most incriminating
thing to do, apparently, and (2) their house is on the left-hand side of the
street as you go up, which (3) makes it easier for a rich man to pass through
the moat into Heaven than to draw a beam of recognition from the eye of
his neighbor. It was all very confusing—especially as Berrisford insisted
that no one had ever told him these things—he had known that they were so
when he came into the world.
"Well, I don't see how you 've allowed yourself to be so friendly with
me," I wondered sarcastically. "You 've been pretty reckless, it strikes me.
How do you know what side of the street our house is on in Perugia,
Wisconsin—or whether, indeed, we live in a house at all?"
"Oh, you 're different," Berri laughed.

"Different from what?"
"From everything; that's why I 'm willing to run the risk. You 're a
strange, barbarous thing, and I like you immensely."
That was all the satisfaction I got. The reason I thought of this was
because Duggie and I discussed it among other things that Sunday morning
on the rocks.
It was perfectly evident that Duggie's family lived on the right side of
the street, and didn't "spell their name with an e," although I should never
have seen them in this light if Berrisford hadn't opened my eyes ("poisoned
my mind," Duggie called it). Duggie's father resembles the Duke in Little
Lord Fauntleroy, and his mother—well, his mother is like Duggie; one
could n't say very much more than that. My impression of them is that they
are between nineteen and twenty feet high, and when they and Duggie and
his elder sister and two younger brothers were assembled, they looked the
way family groups of crowned heads ought to look and don't.
The sister met us at the station with a cart and two ponies.
"They told me to take care of myself," Duggie said to her sort of
doubtfully.
"He 's afraid of my nags," she explained to me as I clambered up
beside her.
"I 'm afraid of your driving," Duggie answered. "I brought Jack Hollis
down here to rest one Saturday and Sunday," he said to me, "and after she'd
whirled him around the country for several hours on two wheels and run
into a few trees and spilled him over a cliff, the poor thing went back to
town with heart disease and has never been the same since."
Now, of course, Duggie merely meant to give me an exaggerated idea
of his sister's driving, and she, of course, knew that his remark was quite
innocent; but nevertheless she began to blush (it was then, I think, that I

first noticed how pretty she was) and abruptly gave one of the horses a slap
with the whip that sent us plunging and nearly snapped my head off.
"Hold on, Tommy," Duggie called to me. "This is what I go through
every time I come home." Then, as a flock of terrified hens scuttled
shrieking from under the ponies' feet, he added: "Tell them I was very brave
and hopeful to the end and that my last words were about the team." But
pretty soon the horses settled down into a fast, steady trot, and we bowled
along the prettiest road I 've ever seen—between thick woods, and, farther
on, great, uneven meadows marked off in irregular shapes with low fences
of rough stone. The meadows to the right ran back to the woods, but the
ones on the left stretched away ahead of us into a vast plain. It gave me a
queer, happy feeling that I can't explain—as if I were going to soar out of
the cart and over the meadows—straight on into space. I could n't imagine
where such a sweep of luminous horizon led to—it seemed extraordinary to
come across anything so much like a prairie in New England. The air, too,
had a lot to do with the way I felt. It was wonderful air—not cold exactly,
and not wet; although I thought every minute that it was going to be both. It
had a peculiar smell to it that, without knowing why, I liked. I filled my
lungs with it, and somehow it made me feel bigger than I usually do. Then
all at once the ponies scampered over the top of a little incline, and,
although Miss Sherwin was telling me something, I gasped out:
"Oh-h-h-h—it's the ocean!" and forgot what she was saying, and even
that she and Duggie and the cart were with me at all. For I had never seen it
before; and it was right there in front of me—brimming over in long, slow,
green, pillowy things that rolled forward and slipped back, forward and
back, until all at once they got top heavy and lost control of themselves and
tumbled over the edge in a delirious white and green confusion that slid
across the sand in swift, foamy triangles almost up to our wheels and made

the ponies shrink to the other side of the road in a sort of coquettish dance.
Then there was a very slim, refined-looking lighthouse on a gray rock
bordered by a little white frill where it touched the water, and beyond that,
putting out to sea, was a great ship with bulging sails, and a steamer that left
a lonely trail of black smoke sagging after it for miles.
I don't know how long I stared at these things, or how long I should
have kept on staring at them, if I had n't happened to glance up and see that
Miss Sherwin was looking down at me and laughing. I think she expected
me to say something, but I couldn't bring myself to come out with either of
the only two things that occurred to me—one of which was that as it looked
so exactly as I always thought it was going to, I did n't see why I felt almost
like bursting into tears when we came over the hill-top and actually saw it;
and the other was—that I should have very much liked to get down and
taste it. However, Miss Sherwin had about all she could do to attend to the
horses and did n't insist on an explanation; so we said hardly anything all
the rest of the way, and just let the wind blow in our faces and watched the
waves tumble across the hard sand for miles.
At first nothing at the Sherwins' seemed in the least real to me. Even
Duggie struck me as altogether different, although he was, of course, just
the same—only seen in unexpected surroundings.
First of all, when we arrived, a groom popped up from behind a hedge
and took the horses; then two young men in dark green clothes with brass
buttons and yellow waistcoats bustled down from the piazza to get our
things out of the cart. They were rather handsome, but had very troubled
expressions, and looked as if they worried a good deal for fear they
shouldn't do it right. Duggie nodded to them over his shoulder, and I think
they were secretly gratified at this—although I suspect them of having
worried terribly for fear they might betray it. They helped us off with our

coats and hats when we got inside, which is all well enough, and makes you
feel as grand as you do in a barber-shop, but has its disadvantages, for they
run away with everything you have, and lock them up somewhere in a safe,
and when you want to go out to play with the dogs or take a walk and think
it all over, you usually have to tell Vincent to tell Dempsey to tell
Chamberlain that you would like a hat.
Miss Sherwin led me through some beautiful rooms, and as we walked
along she turned to me and exclaimed,—
"Aren't you fearfully keen for your tea?"
I really don't care in the least for tea; in fact, I rather dislike it. But she
seemed to take it so for granted that I should be in a sort of tea-guzzling
frenzy by half-past five o'clock that I hated to disappoint her, and was going
to say, "Oh, yes—fearfully," when it flashed through me that I could make
my reply more elaborate and interesting than this, and thought it would be
rather effective to murmur, "One gets so out of the habit in Cambridge."
Then (all this took only about a second) it occurred to me that I 'd never in
my whole life drunk a cup of tea in the afternoon with the exception of the
time that Berrisford had some people out to his rooms. So I merely said—
which was perfectly true: "I don't like tea; but I like those thin, round cakes
that are brown at the edges and yellow in the middle." This made her laugh,
and I was glad I had n't said the other thing, because she 's very pretty when
she laughs.
One corner of the piazza is enclosed in glass, and we had tea out there
where we could watch the sunset and the pink lights on the water as it rolled
up almost to the lawn in the front yard. The two younger brothers came in
—one of them has a tutor and the other goes to St. Timothy's—and while
we were waiting for the tea things to be brought, Mr. and Mrs. Sherwin
sauntered across the grass. I forget whether they had been gathering orchids

in the conservatory or merely feeding the peacocks, but they were both
exceedingly gracious and glad to see me. Yet their very way of taking me so
for granted (just as Miss Sherwin had about the tea) made me
uncomfortable at first. They could n't, of course, have asked me to explain
myself—to tell them what right I had to consume cakes in their crystal
palace and enjoy their sunset; but the mere fact that they did n't seem to
expect me to justify myself in any way made me feel like an impostor.
The man who brought in the tea things had a good deal to do with this.
I 'm quite sure that he disapproved of me from the first. He was older than
the two who met us at the door, and I think he had probably long since
ceased to worry on his own account; but he worried a lot over me. Later—at
dinner—he just gave up all his other duties and stood behind my chair,
mentally calculating the chances of my coming out even or behind the game
in the matter of knives and forks. Whenever I used too many or too few
(which I did constantly) he would glide away and remedy the defect, or
craftily remove the damning evidence of my inattention. In writing to
mamma about my visit I ended my letter by saying: "I had a delightful time
—but it would take me years to get used to their butler." To which mamma
replied: "I'm glad you enjoyed yourself, dear; they must live charmingly.
But I simply can't see why they should n't have good butter. It's so easy to
get it now almost anywhere. Perhaps they don't eat it themselves and don't
realize that they are being imposed upon." (This will be one of the greatest
triumphs of papa's declining years, as he is always blowing me up about my
handwriting.) Whenever Dempsey (the other servants call him "Mr.
Dempsey") came into the glass place I waited in a sort of trembling
eagerness, half expecting him to announce "Lord and Lady Belgrave and
Miss Muriel Fitz Desmond," but the only person who dropped in was an old
man named Snagg, and although Dempsey made as much out of his arrival

as any one possibly could—you can't, after all, do miracles with a name like
Snagg. However, I was grateful to Mr. Snagg for coming, as it brought me
back to earth again.
To tell the truth, before the evening was finished I began to get over
the unreal sensation I had at first, and saw very plainly that whether or not I
felt at home depended entirely on me. Duggie and his family—poor things
—did n't have any idea that their Dempsey paralyzed me with fright, or that
(just as Berri had predicted) by the time dinner was ready I was shaky in the
knees with hunger. They assumed that a friend of Duggie's naturally would
feel at home and know beforehand what was going to happen. This dawned
on me when I realized that Duggie was exactly as he always is, and that the
others were probably exactly as they always were, and I couldn't help
appreciating after a time that if they took me so calmly, it was rather
unreasonable of me not to feel the same way about them. No one made any
effort to entertain me, which is very nice—after you get used to it. Mrs.
Sherwin played solitaire after dinner, while Duggie and his sister (she was
embroidering something) and I sat around a fire that Miss Sherwin said was
built of driftwood from an old whaler, and Duggie declared was
manufactured with chemicals by a shrewd person in Maine. I don't know
who was right, but with the sea murmuring just outside the windows and
coming down every now and then with a great thud on the little beach at the
end of the lawn, I preferred to believe in the old whaler theory. Mr. Sherwin
would appear every few minutes to read us something he had come across
in a volume of literary reminiscences which reminded him of something
entirely different that had happened to Thoreau or Emerson or Hawthorne
or Margaret Fuller—all of whom he had, as a young man, known very well,
indeed. He was delightful.

The next day was Sunday, and as no one awoke me, I found when I got
downstairs that it was after ten o'clock and that everybody, with the
exception of Duggie, had gone to church. Duggie had been up for hours
taking a long walk with the dogs. He came into the glass place on the
piazza, where I had breakfast, and read aloud about the game of the day
before. Out-of-doors it was almost as warm as in summer, so we took some
books and strolled along a cliff to a sheltered place on the rocks, and sat
down in the sun. I did n't feel much like reading, although when you 're
sitting out-of-doors in the sun I think it's rather pleasanter, somehow, to
have a book on your lap. Duggie had a shabby little volume that he read for
a minute or two at a time; then he would stop for five or ten and look at the
sea swirling around a rock away below us. After a while I became curious
to know what the book was, and the next time he closed it over his finger I
reached out and took it. The name of it was M. Aurelius Antoninus, and it
seemed to be a series of short, disconnected paragraphs with a great many
footnotes. A good many of the paragraphs were marked. The only one I can
remember went something like this,—
"Don't act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs
over thee. While thou livest—while it is in thy power, be good."
"I suppose you 're studying this for some course," I remarked after I
had read the extract aloud. "It's so solemn I didn't think you could be
reading it for fun," I added.
"I don't suppose I am reading it for fun exactly," Duggie laughed. "It
isn't very funny to realize the force of that paragraph when there are so
many things you hope to do."
"Well, of course I know I 'm not going to live ten thousand years, but
it's so lovely down here that I don't feel a bit as if I were n't," I said, lying
back in the sun and closing my eyes.

"That's why I read the book," answered Duggie; "it's tremendously
easy to feel that way almost anywhere—down here particularly." He was
more serious, I think, than he looked.
"Why should n't one?" I asked. But he only laughed and told me I 'd
better read the book, too, and find out.
"It might be a short cut—a sort of revelation. It took me a good while
to arrive at it by myself," he added. "Why, when I first went to Cambridge I
had an idea that if a man's family were what's called 'nice,' and well known,
and if he had good manners and knew a lot of other fellows whose families
were nice and well known, and people went around saying that he 'd make
the first ten of the Dickey, and be elected into some club or other—I had an
idea that he really amounted to a great deal."
"Well, does n't he?" I asked boldly, for all that seemed to me pretty
fine.
I think Duggie was going to answer rather sharply, but he must have
decided not to, for after a moment he said:
"I suppose whether he does or not depends on the point of view."
"From yours, I take it, he doesn't?" I mused.
"He has a lot in his favor—all sorts of opportunities that other people
have n't," Duggie admitted, "but I 've come to look at him as quite
unimportant until he tries at least to take some advantage of them. Good
Heavens! the wheels of the world are clogged with 'nice' people," said
Duggie.
"But what on earth can a person do in a place like college, for
instance?" I objected. "You 're there, and you know your own crowd, and
you 're satisfied with it because it's awfully—awfully——" I hesitated.
"Awfully nice," Duggie laughed; "and you never see any one else, and
they 're all more or less like you—and the rest of your class is composed of

grinds, muckers, and 'probably very decent sort of chaps, but'——" Here
Duggie reached over and gave me a push that nearly sent me into the sea.
"But dontche care—I didn't mean to get started. And anyhow there 's plenty
of time."
"Only ten thousand years," I replied.
"Fleetwood's Wednesday Evenings begin next week. If you want to
remove your infamous towhead from its richly upholstered barrel for a
minute, you 'd better come around," he suggested. "Fleetwood had his
Wednesday Evenings on Friday last year because he thought it was more
quaint—but I see he 's changed back."
"He told me if I came I should hear a lion roar," I said, trying to
remember my talk with Fleetwood at The Holly Tree. At this Duggie lay
back and shrieked aloud.
"That man will be found some day torn into small, neat shreds," he
managed to say at last.
"Why?" I asked—for I knew he liked Fleetwood.
"Why, because I'm the lion," Duggie giggled.

VII

It must be several weeks since I 've written a word in my diary. To tell the
truth, I spend so much time writing other things—things that are printed and
sold—actually—at the bookstores—that somehow my own every-day
affairs don't seem so important as they did. In a word—I 've been made an
editor of the Advocate. It seems so wonderful to be an anything of anything
with my name in print on the front page just above the editorials—the
editorials that, as Duggie says sarcastically, have made the President and the
University what they are. Mamma was delighted at my success, and so was
Mildred—although she tried to be funny over my triolet, When Gladys
Sings, in the last number, and wrote me that, unless Gladys were the name
of a quadruped of some kind, amputation here and there would have
improved her. Even papa was pleased, I think, although my first story made
him very angry and he wrote me a terrible letter about it. I had simply
described, as accurately as I could remember it, the time he went as "The
Silver-Tongued Orator from Perugia" to make a political speech in the
country and took Mildred and me with him. I told about the people at whose
house we stayed, described the house and recorded our conversations at
dinner and supper. That was really all there was to it. I considered it quite
harmless. The Crimson in criticising it said: "The Jimsons—a humorous
sketch by a new writer—is the only ray of sunlight in a number devoted
almost exclusively to battle, murder, and sudden death;" a Boston paper
reprinted it in full, and papa was perfectly furious. He wrote to me saying
(among several pages of other things): "While admitting that your

description of my friends is photographic and, in an inexpensive and
altogether odious fashion, rather amusing, I take occasion to call your
attention to the fact—it seems to have escaped you—that they are, after all,
my friends. Furthermore (passing from the purely ethical to the sternly
practical), it is among just these people that you will, in the not very distant
future, be engaged in making (or trying to make) a living. Kindly snatch a
moment or two from your literary pursuits and think this over in some of its
more grim possibilities." He also rather superfluously informed me that I
would "be older some day" than I am now. (This remark, by the way, seems
to have a peculiar fascination for men who have passed the age of fifty.) I
showed the letter to Berri, and when he had finished it he said thoughtfully:
"A few communications like this, and the keen edge of one's humor would
become a trifle dulled."
My election to the Advocate came about in the most unexpected way
possible. It's queer how things happen. Berri was sitting in my room one
afternoon apparently reading by the fire. Suddenly he looked up and
exclaimed:
"Do you realize, Tommy, that failure is staring us in the face?"
"Why, I was in hopes that it had begun to—to avert its gaze
somewhat," I answered, for I thought of course he was referring to the hour
exams—and I 've studied a little every day since that calamity. "Besides," I
added, "I don't see why you need complain; you got through."
"Oh, I'm not talking about our studies," Berri said impatiently; "they
're a detail. I mean that we don't seem to be getting anywhere; we 're not
turning our accomplishments to any practical account; we 're not helping
the college any and making ourselves prominent—prominent in a lawful
sense, I mean."

"But we haven't any accomplishments," I objected. "We both tried for
the Glee Club and they would n't have us; and everybody agreed that we
couldn't play football—although we went out and did everything they told
us to. We can't play the banjo or mandolin, and it's too early in the year to
find out whether we 're any good at rowing or track athletics or baseball; so
there 's nothing left. What on earth can a person do who has n't any talent or
skill or ability of any kind?" I demanded gloomily.
"He can always write," Berri answered, "and he can always be an
editor."
"Oh! you mean we ought to try for the Crimson or something."
"Well, not the Crimson exactly," Berrisford mused; "they say you have
to work like anything on the Crimson; they make you rush about finding out
when things are going to happen, or why they didn't happen when they said
they would. That would be awfully tiresome—because of course you
wouldn't care whether they happened or not. I 'd just like to sit around and
edit; any one could do that."
"I should think you 'd go in for the Lampoon," I suggested; for I
remembered that one of the Lampoon men had drawn a picture of
something Berri had done. Professor Snook, who knows such a lot about
folk-lore, was going to give a lecture in Sever Hall on The Devil. It was
announced on all the bulletin boards by means of printed placards that read
like this: "Thursday, November 10, Professor John Snook will deliver a
lecture on The Devil;" and under the one outside of University, Berri wrote
in pencil: "The first of a series on personalities that have influenced me." If
he got himself noticed by the Lampoon without trying, I thought there was
no telling what he could do if he put his mind to it. We discussed the matter
awhile without, however, deciding on any definite plan.

That night we went to Fleetwood's first Wednesday Evening, and there
I was introduced to— But I 'm going too fast. I 'd better tell about the
Wednesday Evening first.
When I suggested going Berri was n't particularly enthusiastic about it.
He said he was afraid it would resemble one of his aunt's receptions where
everybody was so cultivated that it was just like reading Half Hours with
the Best Authors on a warm Sunday afternoon. I had an idea that it might be
something like that myself, but I finally persuaded Berri to go with me
notwithstanding.
I don't know what to make of myself sometimes. When I 'm with
Duggie I 'm inclined to take things rather seriously; but when I 'm with
Berri it all seems like a joke. They 're so different, and yet I feel as if I were
so much a friend of both. When all three of us happen to be together I find it
most uncomfortable. Of course Berri thought the Wednesday Evening
highly amusing.
It was rather late when we arrived, and the room was crowded with
fellows, very few of whom I had ever seen before. Fleetwood opened the
door for us, with a Shakespearian quotation trembling aptly on his lips, and
led us through the crowd to his inside room, where we left our coats and
hats.
"You must come and meet my lions and hear them roar," Fleetwood
said to us; and was about to take us across the study to where Duggie was
standing against the wall with a semicircle of Freshmen in front of him
drinking in his every word.
"Good gracious, man—you don't mean to say you got me away over
here on a cold night to hear Duggie Sherwin drool about football," Berri
exclaimed to me. Mr. Fleetwood laughed, and seemed to think this was very
funny.

"Just look how glad of the chance all those others are, you
unappreciative boy," he said reproachfully to Berri.
"Oh, well—he doesn't wake them up at a horrible hour every morning
yelling like a fiend under a shower-bath," Berri explained. "You see, the
lion and I occupy the same lair—or do lions live in a den? I never can
remember."
"Perhaps Mr. Ranny knows," said Fleetwood to a tall, studious-looking
fellow who had evidently planned his escape and was in the act of shyly
carrying it out when Fleetwood detained him. Fleetwood introduced him to
Berri and slid away to greet another man who had just opened the door. As I
moved off to join Duggie's group, Berri gave me a queer look; but a few
minutes later I happened to glance across at him, and as the tall fellow was
laughing at everything Berri said I knew that Berri was enjoying himself.
Duggie shook hands with me and said good-evening just as if he had
n't been in my room sprawling on the floor in front of the fire an hour and a
half before, and then went on with what he was saying to the fellows
nearest him—some polite looking little chaps; Freshmen, although I had
never seen them before.
The talk was mostly about football; the games that had been played
and the ones still to come—comparative scores and the merits and defects
of players at other colleges. Of course Duggie could discuss only with the
fellows just in front of him. I think he realized how embarrassing it would
be to any of the others if he were to single them out and address remarks to
them. Besides, it might have sounded patronizing. Yet every now and then,
when whoever was talking happened to say something funny, Duggie
somehow included the whole crowd in the laugh that followed. I think he
managed it by catching everybody's eye at just the right time; I know that—
although I was merely standing there looking on—whenever he caught

mine, I felt as if I were right in the game. This often had the effect of
causing a fellow to say something to the fellow next to him, and so it
frequently happened that people who had joined the group merely to rubber
in embarrassed silence at Duggie, found themselves making acquaintances
and talking on their own account. I learned afterward that this was precisely
what Fleetwood and Duggie counted on. It was Fleetwood's chief reason for
having Duggie as often as he could at his Wednesday Evenings, and
Duggie's only reason for going.
Across the room there was another centre of attraction in the person of
a fine but rather pompous-looking old gentleman with a pink face and a
snowy beard. His audience was more talkative than Duggie's, but not so
large. It was n't composed entirely of Freshmen, either. As I was standing
there making up my mind to slide through the intervening crowd and find
out what he was talking about, Berri, who had been standing with a rapt
expression on the outskirts of the second group, detached himself and came
over to me. "You simply must come and listen to him; it's perfectly
thrilling," he said.
"I was just going over to investigate," I answered. "What 's his
specialty?"
"I don't know how to describe it exactly," Berri replied; "he's a kind of
connecting link with the literary past; he 's what phonographs will be when
we get them perfected. Dickens once borrowed his opera-glasses on the
evening of the twelfth of June years ago, and some years later Thackeray
stepped on his foot at a dinner-party. He remembers what they said
perfectly, and gets asked out a lot. I 've heard him tell the Thackeray thing
twice now, and he 's going to do it again in a minute if there 's enough of a
crowd."

We went over and listened to him for ever so long, and although
Dickens had borrowed his opera-glasses and Thackeray had stepped on his
foot, he was n't in the least what Berri had led me to expect. I found him
delightful and was sorry when he had to leave. (Berri insisted that he was
driven rapidly to town to the Palace Theatre, where he was due to appear at
10.50—between a trick bicyclist and a Dutch comedian.)
When we had said good-by to him, Fleetwood came up bringing a
pleasant-looking chap with spectacles. (I had often seen him in the Yard.)
"This is Mr. Paul," Fleetwood said to me, "and he wants to have words
with you."
Mr. Paul talked about the old gentleman for a minute or two, and then
said quite abruptly,—
"We 've been reading your stuff in English 83, Mr. Wood, and the
fellows think it's darned good. I wish you 'd let us have some of it for the
Advocate."
I was so astonished I just looked at him. Then he went on to say that he
wanted to print two of my themes—The Jimsons, and a description of
something I saw one night in town—and that if I wrote a third and it turned
out to be good, they would make me an editor! He had said that the
Monthly had designs on me (imagine), and that although the Advocate did
n't often do things so hastily, it (I wonder if it's silly of me to write this
down?) didn't want to lose me. I told him that I 'd never dreamed of getting
on one of the papers and felt as if he were making fun of me. But he assured
me he was n't.
Duggie and Berrisford and I walked home together, and when we
reached my room Duggie and Berri began to squabble over Fleetwood's
Wednesday Evenings, and talked and talked until Duggie, seeing how late it
was, got undressed (talking all the time) and left his clothes on my floor,

and continued the conversation even after he had gone into his own room,
turned out the lights and got into bed.
Berri, of course, started out by saying,—
"Well, I don't see what 's the good of it," and Duggie immediately
undertook to enlighten him. Whereupon Berri—fearing that the attempt
might be successful—took another tack and exclaimed,—
"I should think you'd feel so ridiculous backed up there against the
wall making conversation—or perhaps you enjoy being an object of
curiosity." Duggie got very red, and I think he considered Berri unusually
cheeky and impertinent, but he did n't snub him and I 'm sure Berri was
disappointed; he loves to irritate people.
"I don't think my feelings in the matter are particularly important,"
Duggie answered. "I don't see why you haul them in."
"Oh! but they are," Berri insisted. "I was n't in the least interested in
you when you were over there doing your stunts; but here, at home—in the
bosom of the family, so to speak—you 're perfectly absorbing. Now,
honestly, Duggie, don't you think that in the end it 'll do you a lot of harm—
exhibiting yourself this way, and sort of saying to yourself: 'I am the only
Duggie Sherwin; when Fleetwood tells the Freshmen that I am going to be
there, the room is jammed'—and all that sort of thing. For of course that's
what it amounts to."
Duggie threw back his head and laughed. Then he leaned forward and
gave Berrisford (who was sitting on the floor with his hands clasped around
his knees), a neat little push that rolled him back until he seemed to be
standing on his neck and groping for the ceiling with his feet.
"Berrisford, sometimes you make me very, very sick," Duggie said to
him.

"But own up like a man—isn't that the way you look at it?" Berri
pursued after he had collected himself.
"Of course it is n't—idiot!" Duggie declared indignantly. "Fleetwood
can't do the whole thing himself; he can't turn a lot of shy kids into a pen
and say, 'Now talk and get to know one another.' So he asks other people to
help him. Once in a while he asks me. To-night there were two of us."
"Two Little Evas—two Uncle Toms—two side-splitting Topsies,"
Berri giggled.
"Heaven knows I can talk about other things than football," Duggie
went on, "but I like to talk about it, and they do, too—so why shouldn't we?
And when they have enough of me they get to talking with some one else—
some one in their own class, very likely—or maybe to two or three. Then
they come back again next week, and after a few times they find that they
've made a lot of acquaintances, and perhaps some friends. And there you
are! Their whole four years is probably changed for them and made
infinitely more worth while, merely because Fleetwood takes the trouble to
round them up and make them feel that somebody really wants them. It's
perfectly natural that you should think his Wednesdays funny and
boresome; you always had dozens of rooms to go to from the first day you
came here, and some one in every room who was glad to see you when you
went. But I tell you it isn't that way with everybody, and you 're not the kind
that Fleetwood tries to get at."
"Why did he invite me, then?" Berri asked.
"Upon my soul, I don't know," Duggie declared sarcastically, "but I 'd
be willing to bet that if I see him first he won't invite you again," he
laughed.
Then Berri admitted that Fleetwood's idea was well enough in theory,
but doubted if it really worked.

"That tall spook I jollied this evening for a while was exceedingly
nice; but I sha'n't dash off and call on him to-morrow. I don't suppose I'll
ever see him again," Berri said.
"No, probably not," Duggie assented, "but it's altogether likely that
after time has healed the wound left by your indifference, he may find
consolation in the companionship of some one else. You may not be able to
grasp the fact, Berri, but it is a fact that 'there are others.'" It was in the
midst of this that he began to get ready for bed.
"Why don't you open a salon yourself if you think they 're such 'life-
sweeteners'?" Berri called after him when he went into his own room.
"When I come to the Law School next year, I'm going to," Duggie
shouted back, "but you 'll never see the inside of it; I 'll tell you that right
now."
I did n't join in the discussion at all, for I got to thinking how lucky I
had been from the first. Mamma overheard an old woman on a piazza say
that she made the "young men" change their shoes when it was "snow-
in'"—and that was all there was to it. That chance remark led to my living
in the same house with Duggie and Berri; and what a difference it has
made! Without Berri I never in the world should have known such a lot of
people in so short a time; and without Duggie—well, I think I understand
what my adviser meant when he said he was glad I knew Duggie.
There has been one Advocate meeting since my election and I thought
it was great. All the editors meet in the Advocate President's room on
Tuesday evening to hear the Secretary read the manuscripts that have been
sent in or collected from the English courses during the week. It took them
a long time to settle down to business; in fact no one seemed to want to hear
the manuscripts at all—although I secretly thought this would be very
interesting—and several fellows made remarks and tried to interrupt (the

poetry especially) all the time the Secretary was reading. But he read on in a
businesslike voice and never paid any attention to them except once, when
he grabbed a college catalogue from the table, and without looking away
from the page shied it at a fellow who was repeating the verses the
Secretary was trying to read—only repeating them all wrong and making
them sound ridiculous. In the case of most of the contributions the fellows
began to vote "no" before they had read them half through; but several of
them were hard to decide on, and the board had a lively time making up its
mind. After the reading we sat around the fire and had beer and crackers
and cheese while (as several of the manuscripts expressed it) "the storm
howled without."
A few afternoons ago the Secretary (he has such a queer name—it's
Duncan Duncan), came to my room to see how much I had done on a story
I was writing. It was a little after six o'clock when he got up to go, and as he
was on his way to dinner at Memorial he asked me to dine with him. I had
never been to Memorial at meal time and was glad of the chance to go. It's a
very interesting experience, although I think I prefer the comparative
peacefulness of Mrs. Brown's as a usual thing.
We were joined in the Yard by a friend of Duncan's who sits at the
same table. Duncan is a thoughtful, rather dreamy kind of person (he writes
a lot of poetry for the Advocate), and on the way over he told me how much
he enjoyed living at Memorial—that he never got tired of looking up at the
stained-glass windows and the severe portraits.
"Even with the crowd and clatter there 's always something inspiring
about its length and height," he said. "It has a calmness and dignity that
quite transcend the fact of people's eating there. It's so academic."
"It's so cheap," the other fellow amended; but Duncan did n't mind him
and became almost sentimental on the subject.

Well, I felt sorry for Duncan. We had hardly begun on our turkey and
cranberry sauce when two of the colored waiters got into the most dreadful
fight and rushed at each other with drawn forks. All the men jumped up on
their chairs and waved their napkins and yelled: "Down in front—down in
front!" and "Trun him out!" As the newspapers say of the Chamber of
Deputies, "A scene of indescribable confusion ensued." It was several
minutes before the combatants were hustled off to the kitchen and we could
go on with our dinner. Then a party appeared in the visitors' gallery—a
middle-aged man, two women, and some girls. One of the girls was
decidedly pretty and attracted everybody's attention the moment she leaned
over the rail. The man, however, was what caused the demonstration in the
first place. He didn't take his hat off, which Duncan says always makes
trouble. I don't think anybody really cares one way or the other, but it
furnishes an excuse for noise. A murmur of disapproval travelled across the
room and grew louder and louder until the man with a genial air of "Ah—
these boys have recognized me," came to the front of the gallery and
bowed. He took off his hat, which produced a burst of applause from below,
and then put it on again, which changed the clapping of hands to ominous
groans. The poor thing looked mystified and embarrassed, and I don't know
how it would have ended if the pretty girl hadn't just at that instant been
inspired to pluck a big rose from her belt and toss it over the rail. It fell with
a thud in the middle of our table and twenty-four eager hands shot out to
seize it. I grabbed instinctively with the others, and with the others I 'm
exceedingly ashamed of what happened. The tablecloth and all the dishes
were swept off, and in the scrimmage that followed the table was
overturned. I have a terrifying, hideous recollection of everybody in the
world kneeling on my chest and of something warm and wet on my face
and neck. Then Duncan was saying,—

"It's all right, old man—lie perfectly still; you 've cut yourself a little,
but it doesn't amount to anything. Only don't exert yourself." He looked so
scared and white that I began to be frightened myself and tried to get up.
But he and some of the other fellows very gently restrained me, saying that
I was all right in the peculiar, hurried fashion that, more than anything else,
convinces you that you're all wrong. Duncan's friend and another fellow
were mumbling somewhere near me; I caught these fragments of their
conversation: "It must be an artery—eight or ten minutes if it is n't attended
to—Doctor Banning and Doctor Merrick—telephoned—don't talk so loud
—he might hear."
Then I lay quite still and closed my eyes and tried to think.

VIII

Looked at in one way, it was a humiliating thing to have happen; but on the
other hand, after it was all over, I was able to derive considerable
satisfaction from the fact that I had n't lost my presence of mind. The
remarks I overheard as I lay on the floor of Memorial were anything but
reassuring. I realized that in the scrimmage for the rose I had been
submerged in china, glass, and cutlery,—that some of these things had
severed one of my arteries and that the worst might happen. Of course I was
very much frightened at first, and it was then that I tried to get up; but after
they restrained me, I sank back and began to think of poor mamma. I was
on the point of asking for writing materials, but on remembering that an
accident of this kind was always attended by a sort of dreamy weakness, I
became—actually—so languid that I recall telling myself that it would be of

no use—I would n't have strength with which to write, even if a pen were
thrust into my hand. So I went on thinking about mamma until suddenly a
man with a pointed beard (I have since learned he was a medical student
who happened to be dining with some friends at Memorial) dropped on one
knee beside me and with rapid, skilful fingers began to open my shirt. Then
he stopped very abruptly, and with the most disgusted expression I ever
saw, turned toward the light and examined his fingers. After which he got
up, brushed the dust from his knee, and said in a loud, peevish voice,—
"Tell that child to get up and go home and wash the cranberry-sauce
off his face and neck and put on clean clothes," which I did as quickly as
possible without even waiting to say good-bye to Duncan.
They don't call me "Tommy Trusting" any more. It became
"Cranberry" for a day or two, then it was shortened to "Cranny," and now
it's "Granny"—"Granny Wood." Berri says that it has a ring of finality to it,
and that I 'll never be known by any other name.
Since the great game (I don't believe I 've touched upon the great
game), the college seems to have settled down once more to an every-day
sort of existence, with the Christmas holidays looming up now and then in
letters from home. (As I was going out this morning, the postman met me at
the gate and gave me four letters with the Perugia postmark. It 's funny how
my feelings toward that poor man vary. When he hands me letters from
home, I think he 's one of the nicest-looking persons I ever saw, but when
he doles out a lot of bills, he seems to have a hard, cynical expression that I
hate. I meet him at The Holly Tree occasionally, where he goes to snatch a
nourishing breakfast of coffee and lemon-pie.)
I have n't alluded to the great game for several reasons—the chief one
being that (as Berri says when people explain why they didn't pass certain
exams), "I dislike post-mortems." I suppose it might have been, in various

ways, a more distressing event than it actually was. The seats, for instance,
might have collapsed and killed all the spectators; there might have been a
railway collision on the way down; there might have been an earthquake or
a tidal-wave. That none of these things happened is, of course, cause for
congratulation—if not for bonfires and red lights on Holmes' Field. It is
always well, I suppose, to have something definite to rejoice over. The long
trip in the train back to Boston after the game, with every one hoarse and
tired out and cross and depressed, was— But I had determined not to
mention it at all.
Poor Duggie! I know it nearly killed him. He has tried to refer to it
philosophically and calmly in my room once or twice since then; but he
never gets very far. He knows what he wants to say and ought to say, but he
's so intimate with Berri and me that I don't think he altogether trusts
himself to say it. I imagine he finds it easier to talk to comparative
strangers. I was afraid at first that Berri was going to find in the subject a
sort of inexhaustible opportunity for the exercise of his genius for making
people uncomfortable; but instead of that, I 've never known him to be so
nice. For the first time he has allowed himself to show some of the
admiration for Duggie that, all along, I 've felt sure he really has, and
Duggie appreciates his delicacy—although in one way it grates on him
almost as much, I think, as if Berri were just as he always is.
The other day mamma said in one of her letters, "I often wonder how
you spend your days; just what you do from the time you go out to
breakfast until you go to bed at—I hesitate to think what o'clock." So when
I answered her letter I tried to put in everything I did that day, and here it is:
—
8.30 A.M.—Woke up in the midst of a terrible dream in which a
burglar was pressing a revolver to my temple, and found that beast, Saga,

standing by my bed with his cold, moist nose against my cheek. I threw
shoes at him until he ran away yelping, which hurt Berri's feelings and
made him very disagreeable to Duggie and me about the bathtub. He said
we ought to let him have his bath first, as it took him so much longer!
9.15. Breakfast at The Holly Tree. Berri came with me, as he said he
disliked last chapters, and it was Mrs. Brown's day for concluding her great
serial story entitled "Corned Beef." At The Holly Tree we found Mr.
Fleetwood, who hid coquettishly behind a newspaper when he saw us
coming and exclaimed,—
"Go away,—go away, you unreverend, clever boy. You—you!" he
added, shaking his finger at Berri. "I don't mind the other one—the little
one," he went on when we had hung up our coats and hats and went over to
his table; "but you have 'a tongue with a tang.' I sha'n't ask you again to my
Wednesday Evenings." Of course this was perfect fruit for Berri, who sat
down at once and implored Fleetwood with tears in his eyes to tell him
what he had done, and begged him not to blight his (Berri's) career at the
outset by denying him admission to the Wednesday Evenings. He vowed
that he felt ever so much "older" and "broader" and "thoughtfuller," and all
sorts of things that he never in the world will feel, just for going that once.
But Fleetwood pretended not to listen to him, and went on reading the
paper, interrupting Berri every now and then with: "Viper—viper!" or
"Serpent—serpent!" I think he really likes Berri immensely, but is shrewd
enough to know that he never can get at him by being serious. We had a
very jolly breakfast, and Berri left declaring that he would n't rest until he
had induced some famous man to step on his feet.
"Then I 'll be a lion myself and I sha'n't go to your Wednesday
Evenings, no matter how much you ask me," he said. At which Fleetwood

held his head with one hand and waved toward the door with the other,
moaning,—
"Go away,—go away, both of you! You 've caused me to drink four
cups of tea without knowing what I was doing. I think you want to drive me
mad."
10.30. Neither of us had a lecture until eleven o'clock, and we were
looking at some new books in a window on the Square when Hemington
appeared. He touched us on the shoulders in a confidential kind of way, and
then, looking furtively at the people who were waiting near by for a car,
lowered his voice mysteriously, and asked us to go with him to his room.
"I have something over there that I don't mind letting you in on," he
said. "Only you must n't of course speak of it; it might get us into a good
deal of trouble with the government."
This sounded rather exciting, so we hurried to Hemington's room
without talking much on the way over, as Hemington did n't communicate
anything further and we, of course, could n't help wondering what he was
going to show us. When we got into his study, he gave a peculiar rap on his
bedroom door and out came a strange-looking little person,—short and
plump, with black, curly hair and big black eyes and a sallow, almost dusky
skin. A bright red handkerchief knotted loosely around his neck gave him a
picturesque, a tropical air, that, considering we were in Hemington's prosaic
study in Stoughton Hall, thrilled us from the first.
"This is Amadéo," said Hemington. (Hemi is taking Spanish I., and I
think he enjoyed as much as anything pronouncing the name in a deep, rich,
careless sort of way; he hauled it in every other second.) "It's all right,
Amadéo," he went on, for although Amadéo smiled a most beautiful smile
full of very regular and dazzling teeth, he turned to Hemington with a look

intended to express inquiry and misgiving. "You can trust these men; they
are your friends."
At this Amadéo flashed his teeth again and kissed Berri's hands. Berri
looked exceedingly shocked, and I craftily put mine in my pocket.
"He 's a deserter," Hemington explained; for Berri began to rub his
knuckles with a handkerchief, Amadéo looked hurt, and there was a
moment of embarrassment all round. "He escaped from a merchantman that
got in a few days ago from ——" (As I don't take Spanish I., it's impossible
for me to give the luscious name of the island that Amadéo's boat had come
from. It sounded something like Santa Bawthawthawthoth.) "The skipper
was a brute—a regular old timer, and Amadéo could n't stand it any longer.
He and a pal swam ashore with all their worldly possessions on their backs
done up in tarpaulins (they were fired at six times when they were in the
water), and his possessions" (here Hemington lowered his voice and
Amadéo glanced sharply at the door) "consisted of three or four hundred of
the best cigars you ever smoked in your life. He got them at Santa
Bawthawthawthoth, and as he has n't a cent, of course he wants to sell them.
He asks about a fourth as much as you have to pay for a perfectly wretched
cigar at any place in town. They naturally did n't go through the custom
house, and that's why you have to keep it all so quiet."
Amadéo went into Hemington's bedroom and returned with an oil-skin
bundle that looked like those round, flat cheeses you see under cages of
green wire in grocery stores. He untied it (glancing apprehensively at the
door from time to time, and once clasping it to his breast when he heard a
step in the hall outside), and disclosed the smuggled treasure. I have n't
begun to smoke yet, but Berri and Hemington each took a cigar, and after
puffing away for several seconds, Berri said his was simply delicious. It
certainly smelled very good, and I was very sorry I had to run away in a few

minutes to my eleven o'clock lecture, for Amadéo began to tell of some of
his experiences on the merchantman, and they were pretty fierce. Berri cut
his lecture, and I should have, if I were n't on probation. One of the
penalties of probation is that you can't cut without an excuse that holds
water at every pore.
11-12 M. Listened to a lecture—with experiments—on physics. The
experiments did n't turn out well, and the instructor seemed much annoyed.
I don't think he has the right idea. My experiments in the laboratory always
give beautiful results. I find out first of all from the book what Nature is
expected to do; and then I see that she does it. I 'm one of the most
successful little experimenters in the class.
12 M. Ran back to Hemington's room. Amadéo had gone, but Berri
and Hemington had bought all the cigars. Berri had learned a lot of Spanish
in my absence, and could say "Amadéo" and "Santa Bawthawthawthoth"
with almost as fluent a hot-mush effect as Hemington could. He packed his
share of the cigars in Hemi's dress-suit case, and we took them over to our
house.
1 P.M. Went to luncheon at Mrs. Brown's, and tried to borrow a shirt
from everybody at the table, but without success. Duncan Duncan asked me
to a tea in his rooms this afternoon to meet his mother and sisters and some
girls from town. I promised to go, but Miss Shedd, my washerwoman,
slipped on the ice and hurt herself and has n't been able to do my clothes for
more than two weeks, and I discovered this morning that there were no
more shirts in my drawer. Berri or Duggie would lend me one, but Berri
unfortunately hasn't any, either, as Miss Shedd does his washing too, and of
course anything of Duggie's on me is ridiculous. I wore a suit of his
pajamas one night when I had a cold, as they 're thicker than mine, and the
shoulders hung down around my elbows. Well, nobody would lend me a

shirt—for no reason in the world except that they realized I simply had to
have one and thought it would be amusing not to.
While we were at luncheon, Berri and Hemington gave every one two
or three cigars, and Berri said knowingly: "I wish you fellows would try
these and tell me what you think of them. I happened to get hold of them in
a rather odd way; I can't tell you how exactly—at least not for a few days.
They 're not the usual thing you buy at a store. They come from Santa
Bawthawthawthoth."
We went on talking and forgot all about the cigars, until Berri, who is
very sensitive to any kind of scent or odor, suddenly looked up and said,—
"What a perfectly excruciating smell! It's like overshoes on a hot
register, only much worse. What on earth is it?" At this the rest of us at the
table began to sniff the air, and I confess it was pretty bad. Bertie
Stockbridge had finished his luncheon while we were still eating, and had
taken his chair over to the window, where he was reading something for a
half-past one recitation and smoking one of Amadéo's cigars. He was too
absorbed in his book to hear the rest of us, but all at once he looked up with
a very pained expression and exclaimed,—
"What a beastly cigar! I was reading and did n't notice how queer it
was; it 's made me very sick." Then of course we all discovered at once
where the hot rubbery fumes came from,—all but Berri and Hemington,
that is to say; they refused to believe it. So everybody began to light cigars,
and in a minute or two the room was simply unendurable. Stockbridge said
they were like the trick cigars you see advertised sometimes; the kind that
"explode with a red light,—killing the smoker and amusing the spectators."
We dissected several of them; they seemed to contain a little of everything
except tobacco. The fellows insisted on knowing all the details of the
colossal sell, and although Berri and Hemington felt awfully cheap about

their part in it, they finally told. Duggie says an Amadéo or a Manuele or a
Luigi or an Anselmo appears in Cambridge every year at about this time,
and invariably returns to Santa Bawthawthawthoth laden with Freshman
gold.
1.25 P.M. Rushed home; got a shirt and took it to a Chinese laundry
just off Mt. Auburn Street and implored the proprietor to wash it and have it
ready for me by five o'clock. He seemed to think me somewhat insane, and
said in a soothing, fatherly kind of way,—
"You come back day aftle to-mollel." Then I explained the situation
and told him I would give him anything he asked if he would do me this
favor. He made strange Oriental sounds, at which sleepy, gibbering things
tumbled out of a shelf behind a green calico curtain, and from a black hole
in the partition at the end of the shelf there began a tremendous grunting
and snuffling, pierced by squeaks of rage and anguish. Then five Chinamen
swarmed about my shirt, gesticulating murderously, and uttering raucous
cries like impossible birds. I wanted to stay and see how it all turned out;
but the bell had rung for my half-past one o'clock, and I hurried away.
The Oriental temperament is an impassive, deliberative, sphinx-like,
inscrutable thing.
1.40-2.30 P.M. This hour I spent in class listening to a lecture on
narration. I enjoyed it very much, and the hour went by so quickly that
when the instructor dismissed us, I thought he had made a mistake. He gave
us short scenes from various famous books in illustration of his points; and
ended, as usual, by reading a lot of daily themes written by the class. Two
of them were mine. He said they were good, but pointed out how they could
have been better. One of his suggestions I agree with perfectly, but I think
he 's all off in regard to the other. I 'll talk it over with him at his next
consultation hour. Some of the fellows thought the whole thing perfect

drool; but I confess it interested me very much. I never feel like cutting this
course, somehow.
2.30. Went to my room with the intention of reading history until it
was time to go for my shirt, and—if it was done up—get ready for the tea. I
had read only part of a chapter when some fellows, passing by, yelled at my
windows. I had made up my mind, when I began to read, not to answer any
one, as it 's impossible to accomplish anything if you do. But of course I
forgot and yelled back, and in a minute three fellows clattered up the stairs
and I realized that they were good for the rest of the afternoon.
It's a queer thing about going to see people here. I don't think that any
one ever goes with the intention of staying any length of time, or even of
sitting down; you merely drop in as you 're passing by and happen to think
of it. You would n't believe it if somebody told you you were destined to
stay for several hours. But that's what usually happens. Another queer thing
is that very few fellows admit that they 're studying when you come in,
unless of course it's in the midst of the exams. If you find a man at a desk
with a note-book and several large open volumes spread out before him,
and you say to him, "Don't mind me—go on with your grinding," nine times
out of ten he'll answer, "Oh, I wasn't grinding; I was just glancing over
these notes." The tenth man fixes you with a determined eye and replies:
"You get out of here, or take a book and go into a corner and shut up."
3.45. We all took a walk up Brattle Street past the Longfellow house as
far as James Russell Lowell's place and back. It's a great old street, even
with the leaves all gone—which makes ordinary places so dreary. Duggie
pointed out the most famous houses to me one day and told me who had
lived in them. I tried to do it this afternoon, but the fellows said they did n't
care.

5. Got my shirt at the Chinaman's. It looked all right, but it was still
damp in spots—wet, in fact. I went prepared to pay almost any price after
all the excitement I had caused; but the proprietor was surprisingly
moderate in his demands. I gave him something more than he asked, but he
would n't take it until I accepted some poisonous-looking dried berries done
up in a piece of oiled paper. He seemed to have grasped the idea of a tea, for
he kept saying over and over again with a delighted smile: "You go see girl
—you go see girl."
5.20. Went to Duncan's tea and "saw girl"—lots of them. They were
very nice, and pretended they were dreadfully excited at being in a college
room. They asked all sorts of silly questions, and the fellows replied with
even sillier answers. Duncan had taken them to see the museums and the
glass flowers and Memorial and the Gym, and had done the honors of
Cambridge generally.
6.30. Went to dinner at Mrs. Brown's, but as I had just come from
Duncan's, where I had drunk two cups of tea (I don't know why, as I hate it)
and had eaten several kinds of little cakes, I had no appetite whatever.
Somebody had put a chocolate cigar on Berri's and Hemington's plate,—the
kind that has a piece of gilt paper glued to the large end. Berri and
Hemington had to stand a good deal of guying during dinner, but were
consoled by the fact that Amadéo's pal had worked precisely the same game
on some other men we know slightly at the very moment that Amadéo
himself was doing us.
7.15. Went to my room and made a big fire, as I had a curious kind of
chill, although the house was warm and it was n't cold outside. I had just
decided to stay at home and read, when I came across an Advocate postal
card on my desk, and remembered that there was a meeting of the board in
the Secretary's room at eight o'clock.

8.11. Listened to manuscripts and voted on them, and then sat around
and talked afterwards. It's rather embarrassing sometimes when a story
happens to be by one of the editors and isn't good. This evening we had a
long, terribly sentimental passage from the life of a member of the board.
We all knew who had written it, and although it was ever so much worse
than the tale that had just been read (which had been most unmercifully
jumped on), the criticisms were painfully cautious and generously sprinkled
with the praise that damns. Of course it isn't always this way when the
editors submit things; they 're often made more fun of than anybody else.
But this man for some reason is n't the kind with whom that sort of thing
goes down. He has been known to refer to writing for the Advocate as "My
Art."
One thing that happened during the evening made a good deal of fun.
The advertisers have kicked about our not having the leaves of the paper
cut. They say that the subscribers cut the leaves of the reading matter only,
and never get a chance to see the advertisements at all. We think it is ever so
much nicer not to have it done by machinery, for when the subscribers do it
themselves with a paper-cutter, the effect on the thick paper is very rough
and artistic. Well, we discussed this for a long time, until some one
exclaimed: "I don't see why we shouldn't have it done by hand. It would
take a little longer, but the expense would n't amount to much, and in that
way we could have our rough edges and appease the advertisers at the same
time." So after some more talk it was voted on and carried unanimously.
Then the President got up, and turning to a solemn person who had been
very much in favor of the motion, said:
"It has been moved and carried that the leaves of the Advocate be cut
henceforth by Hand. Mr. Hand, you will kindly see that the work is done on
time; I think there are only eight or nine hundred copies printed this year."

11. On the way home from the Advocate meeting I saw the most
gorgeous northern lights I ever imagined,—great shafts of deep pink that
shot up from the horizon and all joined at the middle of the sky like a
glorious umbrella. I ran upstairs to get Duggie and Berri, but neither of
them was in; so, as I simply had to have some one to marvel with, I called
Mrs. Chester. She and another old crone—Mis' Buckson—were having a
cup of tea in the kitchen, and did n't seem particularly enthusiastic over my
invitation to come out and see the display, but they finally bundled up in
shawls and followed me to the piazza. We stood there a minute or two
looking up in silence, and I thought at first that they were as much
impressed as I was. Finally, however, Mrs. Chester gave a little society
cough and remarked,—
"It's real chilly, aren't it?" and Mis' Buckson, drawing her shawl more
tightly about her bent shoulders, jerked her chin in an omnipotent, blasé
kind of fashion towards the heavens, and croaked,—
"That there's a sign o' war." Then they both limped back to the house.
11.30. Made a big blaze in the fireplace, as I was cold again and did n't
feel well at all. I sat down to write to mamma, and was just finishing when
Duggie came in on his way to bed. He 's not in training now and can stay up
as long as he pleases. He asked me how often I wrote to mamma, and I told
him that I had written twice a week at first because there was so much to
tell, but that now since things had settled down and I did n't have so much
to say, I write about once a week. He answered that there was just as much
to say now as there ever was, and told me to write twice a week or he 'd
know the reason why.
Then I went to bed and had a chill. And that's how a whole day was
spent from half-past eight in the morning until half-past twelve at night.

The next morning I woke up with a very bad sore throat and a stiff
neck and pains all over. Duggie and Berri made me send for a doctor, and
signed off for me at the office. I can't imagine how I caught cold, unless,
perhaps, it was from wearing that wet shirt.

IX

I was very sick for about three days, and just sick for three or four days
more. When Berri signed off for me at the office, the college doctor bustled
around to my room at noon to see what was the matter. His motives in
doing this are somewhat mixed, I believe. He has not only the health but the
veracity of the undergraduate very much at heart. If you are laid up, of
course he has to know about it; and if you are n't well enough to attend
lectures but manage with a heroic effort to go skating,—well, he likes to
know about that too.
"Of course you haven't measles," Duggie said when he came in a few
minutes after Dr. Tush had gone, "but equally, of course, he said you had,—
did n't he?"
"Yes, he did," I answered dismally; for he had told me this at
considerable length, and I remembered that measles a good many years
before had almost been the end of me.
"Well, that's a relief," Duggie went on cheerfully. "You may have all
sorts of things, but it's a cinch that you have n't measles. Tush is a
conservative old soul; he always gambles on measles, and of course every
now and then he wins. It pleases him immensely. He usually celebrates his

success by writing a paper on 'The University's Health,' and getting it
printed in the Graduates' Magazine."
When the other doctor—the real one—came, he found that I was
threatened with pneumonia.
Oh, I had a perfectly miserable time of it at first. The feeling
dreadfully all over and not being able to breathe was bad enough, but I
think the far-away-from-homeness and the worrying about mamma were
worse. I was afraid all the time that she would hear (although I could n't
imagine how that would be possible), and then in the middle of the night I
lay awake hoping and praying that she would hear and leave for Cambridge
by the next train. I don't suppose I realized just then how wonderfully good
Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester were to me. Duggie and Berri took turns
in sitting up all night and putting flannel soaked in hot mustard-water on my
chest (ugh! how I loathe the smell of mustard), and when they had to go to
lectures during the day,—I think, as a matter of fact, they cut a great many
of them,—Mrs. Chester would come in and hem endless dish-cloths by the
window. Berri says that he ceased to worry about me from the time I looked
over at Mrs. Chester after about half an hour's silence and exclaimed,—
"Sew some more with the crisscross pattern; I 'm tired of those dingy
white ones."
As I began to get better, I appreciated how much trouble I 'd given
them all and tried to thank them; but Berri said,—
"Why, your illness has been a perfect god-send to me. I 've done more
grinding lately between midnight and six in the morning than I ever thought
would be possible. I 've caught up with almost everything." And Duggie
stopped me with,—
"But if it had n't been Berri and I, it would have been someone else—
which we're very glad it was n't."

Old Mrs. Chester is a jewel. I didn't pay much attention to her at first,
but was just glad to know she was in the room. Later, however, when I
began to want to get up and she devoted the whole of her marvellous art to
keeping me amused, I appreciated her. She is wonderful. I was going to
assert that she inspires the kind of affection one can't help feeling for a
person who is all heart and no intelligence; but that, somehow, misses the
mark. She has intelligence—lots of it—only it's different. And before my
recovery was complete I began to wonder if it wasn't the only kind that is,
after all, worth while. For it's the kind with which books and newspapers
and "going a journey" and other mechanical aids have nothing to do.
(Perhaps I should concede something to the influence of foreign travel, as
there was a very memorable expedition "to Goshen in New York State"
some time in the early sixties.) Mrs. Chester's intelligence gushes undefiled
from the rock, and then flows along in a limpid, ungrammatical stream that
soothes at first and then enslaves. Her gift for narrative of the detailed,
photographic, New England variety positively out-Wilkins Mary, and I am
to-day, perhaps, the greatest living male authority on what Berri calls la
cronique scandaleuse of Cambridge. One of her studies in the life of the
town forty years ago (it was a sort of epic trilogy that lasted all morning and
afternoon and part of the evening with intermissions for luncheon and
dinner) I mean to write some time for the Advocate. It all leads up to the
New Year's Eve on which "old Mrs. Burlap passed away," but it includes
several new and startling theories as to the real cause of the Civil War, an
impartial account of the war itself, a magnificent tribute to the late General
Butler, a description of Mrs. Chester's wedding,—the gifts and floral
tributes displayed on that occasion together with a dreamy surmise as to
their probable cost,—a brief history of religion from the point of view of
one who is at times assailed by doubt,—but who doesn't make a practice of

"rushin' around town tellin' folks who'd only be too glad to have it to say"
(this last I assumed to be a thrust at Mis' Buckson),—a spirited word picture
of the festivities that took place when Cambridge celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary as a city, and at the end a brilliant comparison between
Cambridge and "Goshen in New York State." There was, I believe, some
mention of the passing away of old Mrs. Burlap on New Year's Eve, but of
this I am not sure.
One thing I discovered that rather astonished me in this part of the
world (a locality that Berri in one of his themes called "a cold hot-bed of
erudition"), and that is—Mrs. Chester doesn't know how to read. I never
would have found it out but for an embarrassing little miscalculation on her
part, in the method by which until then she had delightfully concealed the
fact. More than once while I was sick, she sat by the lamp apparently
enjoying the evening paper that Duggie subscribes to, and I had n't the
slightest suspicion that she was probably holding it upside down, even
when I would ask her what the news was and she would reply,—
"Oh, shaw—these papers! They 're every one of 'em alike. They don't
seem to be any news to 'em. I don't see why you young gentlemen waste
your good money a-buyin' 'em."
Often on the way upstairs she takes the letters that the postman leaves
between the banisters in the little hall below, and manages to distribute
them with more or less accuracy.
"I 've got somethin' for you, and it 's from your mother too, you
naughty little man, you," is her usual way of handing me a communication
from mamma. I did n't realise until the other day that, as mamma's letters
always came in the same kind of gray-blue envelopes, it doesn't take a
chirographic expert to tell whom they are from. Nor did I recall that, when

Mrs. Chester appears with a whole handful of things, she invariably stops
short in the middle of the room and artlessly exclaims,—
"Well, now, if that does n't beat all! Here I 've climbed up them steep
stairs again and forgotten my specs. Who 's gettin' all these letters anyhow?"
A few mornings ago, however,—when they let me sit up for the first
time,—Mrs. Chester appeared with two letters. One of them was
unmistakably gray-blue, but the other was white and oblong and non-
committal. She paused at the door as if about to examine the address, and
then suddenly,—
"If I ain't the most careless woman in the world," she said. "I 've gone
and brought up the letters again, and forgotten—" But just at this point we
both became aware that her steel-rimmed spectacles were dangling in her
other hand. They not only dangled, but they seemed to me a moment later to
dangle almost spitefully; for Mrs. Chester's worn cheeks became very pink.
She looked at the spectacles and at the white envelope and at me. Then she
said with a sort of wistful lightness,—
"Maybe you can make it out; your eyes are younger than mine. I never
seen such a letter; it's so—so—it's so flung together like."
"It is—isn't it?" I agreed hastily, as I stretched out my hand, to receive
a letter from papa with the address in type-writing.
Just as I thought would happen, mamma heard I was sick and was, of
course, very much worried. Dick Benton—who has never come near me,
and whom I 've only seen twice on the street since College opened—
mentioned the fact of my illness in a letter home. (I suppose he did it in a
despairing effort to make his sentences reach the middle of page two.) Of
course Mrs. Benton had to throw a shawl around her meddling old back and
waddle across the street to our house, to find out the latest news; and as

there had n't been any news, mamma's letter to me expressed a "state of
mind." But I fixed her (and incidentally Dick Benton) with a telegram.
By the way, I really must speak to mamma about her recent letters to
me. Mildred has been away from home, and as mamma writes very
regularly to both of us, she often refers to things she remembers having
written to somebody, but without pausing to consider how maddening they
are when the somebody doesn't happen to be myself. From her last, for
instance, I gleaned these interesting items without having the vaguest idea
what they belong to:—
"Your father and I have just got back from the funeral. I suppose, when
one arrives at such a great age, death is a relief. But it is always solemn.
"Is n't it nice about the Tilestons? I don't know when—in a purely
impersonal way—I 've been so pleased. They 've struggled so long and so
bravely and now it seems as if their ship had come in at last. Of course, I
should n't care to spend so much time in South America myself, (Guatemala
is in South America, is n't it?) but they all seem delighted at the prospect."
Now would n't that jar you?
My acquaintances generally found out that I was sick about the time
that Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester discharged me, so to speak, as well.
I could n't go out, and the doctor made me stay in bed longer than was
really necessary, as the bottom of the furnace fell to pieces one morning and
it was impossible to heat the house for several days. But I felt pretty well.
By that time, as I say, there was all at once a ripple of interest among my
friends over the fact that I was sick. They were awfully kind, and came to
my room from early in the morning—right after breakfast—until late at
night, when they would drop in on their way back from the theatre. My
desk was a perfect news-stand of illustrated magazines and funny papers,
and I had left in my book-case, probably, the queerest collection of novels

that was ever assembled outside of a city hospital. Duggie had a fit over
them, and as he read out the titles one evening, he kept exclaiming, "What,
oh, what are the children coming to!" The only volume that was n't fiction
was a thing called "The Statesman's Year Book," and was brought by a
queer sort of chap who is very much interested in sociology. I know him
pretty well; so after I thanked him, I could n't help saying,—
"What on earth did you lug this thing up here for?—it looks like an
almanac." To which he replied,—
"Well, it's darned interesting, I can tell you. Until I got it I never knew,
for instance, how many quarts of alcohol per head were consumed annually
in Finland."
Although Duggie did n't say anything, I don't think he was particularly
pleased at the fellows dropping in so often and staying so long. They played
cards a lot, and smoked all the time until you could hardly see across the
room; and sometimes when night came I felt rather tired and my eyes and
throat hurt a good deal. But I confess I liked it, even if Duggie and Mrs.
Chester did n't.
Only one change of any importance took place while I was laid up:
Berri's Icelandic dog—Saga—has been removed from our midst. I was
aware that an unusual spirit of peace and order reigned in the house as soon
as I began to be about once more, but I attributed it vaguely to the
chastening influence of my illness. However, one morning, when on my
way to a lecture I remembered that I had noticed my best hat lying on a
chair in my study as I came away, and ran back to save it from being eaten,
it occurred to me that I had n't seen Saga for days. So, while Berri and I
were strolling home from luncheon, I asked him what had happened.
"He 's gone—gone, poor old darling!" said Berri; "I hate to speak of
it."

"He was n't stolen or run over or anything, was he?" I asked
sympathetically; for now that Saga was no longer an hourly source of
anxiety and conflict, I felt reasonably safe in expressing some regret. "Did
he run away?"
"No, he did n't leave me," Berri answered sadly; "I gave him up. You
see—I found out that there is a law against bringing them into the State;
they always go mad as soon as the warm weather comes. So I gave him to
one of the little Cabot girls on her birthday. She was awfully pleased."
I am rather worried over something that I got into lately without
stopping to think how much it might involve. Berri and that tall spook,
named Ranny, that he met at Fleetwood's Wednesday Evening, struck up
quite an intimacy not long ago, although I can't for the life of me see how
they managed it. He isn't a Freshman, as we thought, but a Sophomore.
Berri was waiting in a bookstore in town one day to go to a matinée with a
fellow who did n't turn up; and while he was standing there, Ranny came in
and began to drive the clerks insane over some Greek and Sanscrit books he
had ordered weeks before and that no one had ever heard of. Berri looked
on for a while, and, as his friend did n't come and it was getting late and he
—Berri—did n't like to waste the extra ticket, he invited Ranny to go with
him. Well, they not only went to the matinée, they dined in town together
and went again to another show in the evening. Between the acts Ranny
explained to him just wherein the wit of "The Girl from Oskosh" differed
from the comedies of Aristophanes, and Berri says that before they parted
he had learned all about the Greek drama from A to Izzard. Since then
Ranny has been to our house several times, and although Berri likes him, he
usually finds after about an hour that he isn't equal to the intellectual strain;
so he lures Ranny into my room and then gracefully fades away.

Now I like Ranny too. He has, in his ponderous, bespectacled way, an
enthusiasm for several bespectacled, ponderous subjects that is simply
irresistible. One of them is Egyptology and the study of hieroglyphics. Of
course I don't know anything about this, any more than Berri knew about
the Greek drama,—not as much even; for he did, at least, pretend to play a
pagan instrument of some kind in a play they gave at school once, while a
Frenchman behind the scenes toodled away on a flute. But when Ranny gets
to talking about dynasties and cartouches and draws fascinating little
pictures of gods and goddesses named Ma and Pa, and explains how the
whole business was deciphered by means of a piece of stone somebody
picked up in the mud one day,—a regular old Sherlock Holmes, he must
have been,—you simply can't help being carried away and wishing you
could discover something on your own account. He talked so much about it
and made it all seem so real and important that one day when he exclaimed,
—
"And the mystery is that the University ignores this subject—ignores
it!" I really felt that the Faculty was treating us rather shabbily and that we
were n't, somehow, getting our money's worth. We talked the matter over
very seriously, and decided at last that it could n't be stinginess on the part
of the Corporation,—for why should it allow courses in higher mathematics
and philosophy and Italian literature, to which only three or four fellows
went, if it wanted to save the pennies? It was more likely just ignorance of
the importance of hieroglyphics, and the growing demand for a thorough
course of it.
"We probably could get a course all right if we showed them how
some of us feel about it," Ranny mused. "There's a chap in Latin 47 who'd
join, I think—you've seen that middle-aged man with the long sandy beard,
have n't you? He tries almost everything."

The person Ranny referred to did n't seem very promising to me. We
sleep next each other in a history course. He never wears a necktie, and the
last time I saw him there were a lot of dead maple leaves tangled up in his
beard. No one seems to know why he is here.
"Well, that makes three right away," Ranny declared enthusiastically.
"Perhaps Berrisford will join; but even if he does n't three 's enough."
The very next morning after this Ranny appeared to say he was going
to consult Professor Pallas about the new course, and wanted me to go
along and put in a word now and then. This seemed a little sudden to me,
and I said that perhaps I ought to consult my adviser before taking up a new
study, as I had n't done particularly well in the old ones. However, Ranny
said that my adviser ought to be thankful at my showing so much interest
and public spirit. So we went over to Professor Pallas's little private room in
Sever. He was very glad to see us, and when Ranny began to explain the
subject of our coming, his old eyes just glittered. He kept smiling to himself
and nodding his head in assent, and once, when Ranny paused for breath, he
brought his fist down on the table, exclaiming,
"I predicted this—predicted it." Then he thrust his hands in his pockets
and paced excitedly up and down the room. Ranny was of course
tremendously encouraged, and I was somewhat horrified a moment later, to
have him turn toward me and with a wave of his hand declare,—
"My friend, Mr. Wood, feels this weakness in the curriculum more,
perhaps, than any of us; for long before he entered college with the purpose
of specialising in the subject, he surrounded himself with a collection of
Egyptian antiquities that far excels anything of the kind on this side of the
British Museum." (He was referring in his intense way to a handful of
imitation scarabs and a dissipated-looking old mummified parrot that Uncle
Peter brought home from his trip up the Nile. I had indiscreetly mentioned

them one afternoon.) "We are sure of four earnest workers, and there are, no
doubt, many more."
Now the thing that worries me about all this is that Professor Pallas
seemed so gratified and eager to help the cause. His attitude toward us was
that of a scholar among scholars,—deep calling unto deep. He said that he
would love to conduct a course in hieroglyphics himself, but feared he was
n't competent, as he had merely taken up the subject as a kind of recreation
at odd moments during the last six or eight years. He could n't recall any
one in the United States who was competent, in fact, but he knew of a
splendid authority in Germany,—just the man for the place,—and he would
speak to the President about him at the next Faculty meeting. Ranny and I
thanked him profusely, and that at present is where the matter stands. I
wake up in the night sometimes, positively cold at the thought of having
added hieroglyphics to my other worries. Think of a course for which you
could n't buy typewritten notes,—a course the very lectures of which would
be in German,—a course so terrible that no one in the United States would
dare undertake to tutor you in it when you got stuck.
The Christmas holidays are almost here, but it has not been decided yet
whether or not I am to spend them at home. Mildred is still gadding about,
and papa may have to go to New York on business. If he does, mamma will,
no doubt, go with him, and I'll join them there, and we'll all have thin slabs
of Christmas turkey surrounded by bird bath-tubs at a hotel. Berri has
invited me to spend the vacation with him (his mother is living in
Washington this winter), but as he remarks dolefully every now and then
that he has to stay in Cambridge to write a thesis that is due immediately
after the holidays, I don't see how he means to manage. He's been putting
off that thesis from day to day until I don't see how he can possibly do all

the reading and writing and note-taking it necessitates. I 've tried to get him
started once or twice, but he has merely groaned and said,—
"You 're a nice one to preach industry, are n't you?" So I've given up.
Well, it's none of my business if he gets fired from the course.

X

I might have spared myself my anxiety in regard to the course in
hieroglyphics. My adviser overtook me in the yard a day or so after our
interview with Professor Pallas, and after walking along with me for a while
he said,—
"Well, Wood, I 'm glad to see you looking about as usual; I had almost
come to the conclusion that you 'd gone stark mad." I asked him what he
meant, and it seems that old Pallas had made a speech at a Faculty meeting
in which he declared that the deep and ever-growing interest throughout the
undergraduate body in the subject of Egyptology had reached a climax that
demanded a course of some kind. He was very eloquent, and caused a good
deal of mild excitement. Then some one got up and asked who were
concerned in the movement, and Pallas, after fumbling in his side pocket,
finally produced a memorandum and said,—
"The names of those imbued with a spirit for serious archaeological
research are many, but I think that the youth who by his zeal in collecting
and preserving valuable antiquities has done more than any one else to
further this study among his fellows is Mr. Thomas Wood, of the class of
——" But the poor old man did n't get any further, my adviser says, for
everybody in the room began to roar and the meeting broke up in confusion.

Well, that 's off my mind, anyhow; although I don't see why they should
have taken it the way they did. There 's nothing so very extraordinary in
acquiring a love for study when that's what you 're supposed to come here
for.
Berri and I discovered the most fascinating little place the other
evening. We had been in town all afternoon on the trail of an express
package of Berri's that had been lost for days, and were running along
Tremont Street on the way to the Cambridge car, when Berri suddenly
stopped in front of a sort of alley and clutched me. From the other end came
the sound of music,—a harp, a flute, and a violin playing one of those
Neapolitan yayayama songs that always, somehow, make you feel as if you
'd been abroad, even when you 've never been nearer Naples than waving
good-by to your sister from a North German Lloyd dock in Hoboken.
"Let 's go see what it is," Berri said. So we skipped to the other end of
the alley, and found a brightly lighted little restaurant with the music
wailing away in the vestibule. We stood listening for a time and watching
the people who went in. They all stopped to peer through a glass door, and
then after a moment of indecision passed on—up a flight of steep stairs.
Berri, of course, could n't be satisfied until he had solved the mystery of the
glass door, and it was n't long before we were doing just as every one else
did. We saw a long, narrow room with three rows of little tables reaching
from end to end. The walls were covered with gay frescos of some kind (I
could n't make them out, the tobacco smoke was so thick); foreign-looking
waiters were tearing in and out among the tables; flower girls were
wandering up and down with great-armfuls of roses and carnations for sale,
and everybody was laughing and gesticulating and having such a good time,
apparently,—the music was so shrill and the clatter of dishes so incessant,
—that Berri and I turned and gazed at each other, as much as to say, "After

all these years we 've found it at last." But a moment later we realized why
the people we had seen go in had, after a glance, turned away and climbed
the stairs; all the tables were occupied. I think we must have looked as
dissatisfied as the others, for we felt that nothing upstairs could equal the
scene we had just discovered. And we were right. The upper rooms were
comparatively empty and quiet and rather dreary. So we came down again
and were about to take a farewell look and start for home, when Berri, with
his nose flattened against the glass, suddenly exclaimed, "Saved! Saved!"
and pushing open the door, made his way across the room. Who should be
there but Mr. Fleetwood, dining alone at a table in the corner? Berri, after
shaking hands with him, beckoned to me, and in a moment we had both
seated ourselves at Fleetwood's table.
"This is almost as nice as if we 'd really been invited, isn't it?" said
Berri, in his easy way. "You know we were just on the point of giving up
and going home."
"Why didn't you go upstairs?" Fleetwood inquired. (He pretended all
through dinner that we had spoiled his evening.) "It is n't too late even
now," he suggested; "it's much nicer up there; there 's more air."
"There's plenty of air, but no atmosphere," Berri answered. "This is
what we enjoy," he added with a wave of his hand.
"I 'm glad you like my Bohemia," Fleetwood quavered.
"Oh, Bohemia's all right," replied Berri. "Bohemia would be perfect—
if it weren't for the Bohemians."
"What are 'Bohemians'?" I asked, for I 'd often heard people called that
without understanding just what it meant.
"Bohemians?" Berri repeated. "Why, Bohemians are perfectly horrid
things who exist exclusively on Welsh rabbits and use the word
'conventional' as a term of reproach. My aunt knows hundreds of them."

"I wrote a paper once on 'What is a Bohemian?'" Fleetwood put in. "If
you would really like to know—but of course you would n't," he broke off
sadly; "no one does any more. You clever boys know everything before you
come."
"Oh, Mr. Fleetwood, please let us read your paper," we both begged
him enthusiastically. I think he was a little flattered, for we would n't allow
him to talk about anything else until he had promised to tell me where I
could find his article. Berri, however, he refused absolutely, and made me
promise, in turn, not to let him know where to look for it and never to quote
from it in Berri's presence.
"I know him," he muttered dolefully; "I know these memories that
'turn again and rend you;' I 'm an old man; 'Ich habe gelebt' and ge-
suffered."
Well, we had a most delightful dinner. Fleetwood, when he saw that he
was n't going to get rid of us, cheered up and made himself very agreeable.
He can be charming when he wants to be. He and Berri did most of the
talking, although his remarks, as a rule, were addressed to me. The fact is,
he likes me because I 'm sympathetic and a good listener, but Berri he finds
vastly more interesting. Berri has travelled such a lot, and, besides, he has
the knack (I haven't it at all) of being able to discuss things of which he
knows nothing in a way that commands not only attention but respect. For
instance, they got into a perfectly absorbing squabble over the novelist
Henry James, in which Fleetwood deplored and Berri defended what
Fleetwood called his "later manner." Fleetwood ended up with,—
"I 've read everything he 's ever done—some of them many times over
—and I wrote a paper on him for Lesper's not long ago; but I could n't,
conscientiously, come to any other conclusion." To which Berri replied, as

he smiled indulgently to himself and broke a bit of bread with his slim
brown fingers,—
"I often wonder if you people over here who write things about Harry
James from time to time, really comprehend the man at all—notice that I
say 'James the man,' not 'James the writer.' 'Le style c'est l'homme,' you
know; is n't it Bossuet who tells us that?"
"No, it is n't," said Fleetwood, rather peevishly; "it's Buffon—and he
probably stole it from the Latin, 'Stylus virum arguit.'" Fleetwood, of
course, knows what he 's talking about. But, nevertheless, I could see that
Berri's general air of being foreign and detached and knowing James from
the inside—or rather from the other side—impressed him; and as for me, I
was simply paralyzed. For I could have testified under oath that Berri had
never read a word of Henry James' in his life, and that he 'd never laid eyes
on the man. I spoke to him about it afterward and asked him how he dared
to do such things.
"Have you ever read anything by James—have you ever seen 'Harry
James the man,' as you called him?" I inquired.
"No; of course not," Berri answered. "What difference does it make?"
"But you went on as if you knew more about him than even
Fleetwood; and I think that toward the end Fleetwood almost thought you
did himself."
"Oh—that," Berri shrugged, after trying to recall the conversation.
"That was merely what an old frump of a woman said at my aunt's one day
when I dropped in for luncheon. She and Aunt Josephine gabbled and
gabbled, and never paid the slightest attention to me, and although they
were both unusually tiresome, I suppose I could n't avoid remembering
some of the things they said. But it would have been impossible for me to
dwell any longer on that particular topic with Fleetwood, even if my life

had depended on it, because that day at luncheon, just as my aunt's friend
got started on 'James the man,' I happened to glance up and notice that she
was wearing an entirely different kind of wig from the ratty old thing she 'd
flourished in before she went abroad. She had brought back a new one that
was—why, it was an architectural marvel; it looked like the dome of a
mosque, and covered her whole head, from eyebrows to neck, with little
cut-out places for her ears to peek through. It hypnotized me all through
luncheon, and I never heard a word about 'James the man,'—so of course
when I got that far with Fleetwood I had to change the subject. Don't you
remember that we began to discuss Bernhardt's conception of Hamlet rather
abruptly? I 'll never trust that old woman again—after making the mistake
about Buffon. Why, she's positively illiterate!"
Fleetwood told me a lot about Mazuret's—that 's the name of the
restaurant—which made me glad that we had come across it accidentally,—
found it out for ourselves. It's very famous. All sorts of people—writers and
painters and actors and exiled noblemen—used to make a kind of
headquarters of it and dine there whenever they happened to be in town.
Fleetwood has been going there for years, and always sits at the same table.
(That's the proper thing to do; you must have a favorite table, and when you
come in and find it occupied, you must scowl and shrug and complain to the
waiters in a loud voice that the place is going to the dogs. Then everybody
in the room takes it for granted that you 're a writer or a painter, an actor or
an exiled nobleman, and looks interested and sympathetic. We saw several
performances of this kind.) But the place, of course, "isn't what it used to
be." I'm seven or eight years too late, as usual. Some of the poets have
become very successful—which means, Fleetwood says, that they 're doing
newspaper work in New York; some of the painters and actors are beyond
the reach of criticism—which means that they 're dead; and some of the

noblemen are confident that their respective governments are about to recall
them to posts of responsibility and honor—which means that they are in
jail.
It was more entertaining, Fleetwood says, in the days of Leontine,—
the shrewd, vivacious, businesslike Frenchwoman who, when Monsieur
Mazuret became too ill, and Madame too old, used to make change and
scold the waiters and say good evening to you, and whose red-striped
gingham shirt-waists fitted her like models from Paquin. It was Leontine
who brought back the wonderful wall-paper from Paris (through the glass
door it looked like a painting) that represents a hunting scene, with willowy
ladies in preposterous pink velvet riding-habits and waving plumes, and
gentlemen blowing tasselled horns, and hounds and stags—all plunging
through a perfectly impenetrable forest, whose improbable luxuriance Berri
brilliantly accounted for by saying that it was evidently "Paris green."
"Attend now—I tell you something," Leontine used to say
confidentially when the evening was drawing to a close, and but one or two
stragglers were left in the dining-room.
"These peoples—they stay so long sometimes; I tell to them that they
must go. But non—they will not go; and they stay, and they stay, and they
stay. And all at once the—what you call?—the chasse—she begin to move!
The horses—he gallop; the ladies—she scream of laughing; the gentlemen
—he make toot, toot, toot, tooooo! The dogs—Ah-h h-h! The—the—cet
animal-là—the deer?—the deer—Ah-h-h-h!" Carried away by these
midnight memories, Leontine would become a galloping horse, a screaming
lady, a master of hounds, a savage pack, and a terrified monarch of the glen
—all at once. Then, overpowered by the weird horror of it, she would cover
her face with her apron and run coquettishly as if for protection to another
table.

There was another tale—the description of a thunderstorm—a regular
cloud-burst, it must have been—that, one afternoon, overtook Madame and
Leontine in the Place de la Madeleine, Leontine personifying the truly
Gallic elements—the lightning (reels backward—eyes covered with hands)
—the thunder (fingers in ears—eyes rolling—mouth open and emitting
groans)—the rain hissing back from the asphalt in a million silver bubbles
(skirts lifted—tip-toes—mon dieus—shrieks—hasty exit to kitchen)—
Leontine bringing this incoherent scene vividly before one, was worth one's
eating a worse dinner, Fleetwood says, than the dinner at Mazuret's. But
Monsieur is dead, and Madame just dried up and blew away, and Leontine
is married, and—although I don't know when I 've enjoyed a dinner so
much—"the place isn't what it used to be."
While Fleetwood was telling me all this, I noticed that Berri called one
of the waiters and spoke to him in French. I don't know what he said, as he
talked very fast—and anyhow it did n't sound much like the kind of French
I 've been used to. The waiter disappeared, and in half an hour or so a
messenger boy came in and gave Berri a little envelope which he put in his
pocket without saying anything. Then, when we had finished dinner and
were just about to push away from the table, Berri exclaimed,—
"Now we 'll all go to the theatre."
"My dear young man, if you could see the work I have to do this
night," Fleetwood protested with a gesture that seemed to express
mountains of uncorrected themes, "you would realize, for once in your life,
what work really is."
"But I have the tickets," Berri explained; and he brought forth the little
envelope that the messenger boy had given him.
"No—no—no!" Fleetwood answered decidedly, and started for the
door. But Berri detained him.

"By inflicting our company on you we 've spoiled the evening for you,
I know; but you won't spoil it for me by depriving us of yours," he begged
in his engaging way.
"'Sweet invocation of a child: most pretty and pathetical,'" Fleetwood
laughed, and backed into the vestibule. We followed and surrounded him,
so to speak, each taking hold of an arm. Then we all walked through the
alley toward Tremont Street, Fleetwood quavering apprehensively from
time to time, "Now you 'll take me to my car and then bid me adieu, like
two good boys, won't you?" while we agreed to everything he said and
clung to him like sheriffs. Berri was giggling hysterically, but although I
thought the situation rather amusing, I did n't see anything so terribly funny
about it until we got to the parting of the ways and Fleetwood stopped.
Then I noticed that, in addition to the three great red roses that Berri had
bought for our button-holes, Fleetwood had a fourth one, with a long,
flexible stem, growing apparently out of the top of his head. He was so
unconscious of the absurd, lanky thing nodding solemnly over him
whenever he spoke, that when he held out his hand, exclaiming
tremulously,—
"'And so,' in the words of Jessica, 'Farewell; I will not have my father
see me talk with thee,'" and the rose emphasized every word as if it were
imitating him, I gave an uncontrollable whoop, and Berri doubled up on a
near-by doorstep.
"I only would that my father were alive at the present moment to see
me talking with thee," Berri gasped. "I don't know anything he would have
enjoyed more."
Fleetwood looked hurt and mystified and vaguely suspicious, and he
stood there merely long enough to say,—

"'You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked,
hurt not.'" Then, as Berri was still sitting on the doorstep and I was leaning
against the wall, he made a sudden dash for the other side of the street. We
caught him, of course, grasped his arms once more, and walked him off to
the theatre, pretending all the time that we did n't notice his struggles and
how furious he was at having to go with us. Berri kept up an incessant
stream of conversation, saying things that, to an outsider, would have given
the impression that the theatre-party was Fleetwood's, and that we were the
ones who were being dragged reluctantly away from the Cambridge car.
Just before we got to the theatre the solemn rose in Fleetwood's hat toppled
over and dangled against his face. This also we pretended not to see, and as
we had him firmly by the arms, he was unable to reach up and throw it
away; so we made a spectacular entrance through the brightly lighted
doorway, with Fleetwood ineffectually blowing at the rose and shaking his
head like an angry bull. A party of four or five fellows—students—who had
been unable to get tickets were turning away from the box-office as we
appeared, and they naturally stopped to look at us.
This was in the nature of a last straw, for Fleetwood almost tearfully
broke out with,—
"You dreadful, dreadful boys, my reputation is ruined; they 'll think I
've been drinking." Even Berri began to see that we had gone somewhat far,
for he plucked the rose from Fleetwood's cheek, exclaiming,—
"Good gracious, man! where did you get this? You must n't go to the
theatre looking that way. Just because Bernhardt plays Hamlet is no reason
why you should undertake to do Ophelia;" and then he threw it on the floor.
Fleetwood rolled his eyes hopelessly.
Well, we never got home until almost four in the morning. A man
whose seat was behind ours at the play tapped Fleetwood on the shoulder as

soon as we had sat down, and after a whispered conversation he got up and
went away. Then Fleetwood told us the man was a dramatic critic—an
acquaintance of his—who had been sent to write up the play for a morning
paper, but that, as he did n't understand French and was n't much of a
Shakespearian scholar and wanted to go to a progressive peanut party in
West Roxbury anyhow, he had asked Fleetwood to do the thing for him.
Fleetwood used to be on a paper himself, and was delighted to renew old
times.
So all during the performance he made notes on the margin of his
program and chuckled to himself. The occupation, I think, diverted his mind
from Berri and me and helped him to forgive us.
Afterward we went to Newspaper Row and waited for hours in a bare,
rather dirty little room while Fleetwood, standing at a high desk under an
electric light in the corner, wrote his review. He spent much more time in
groaning, "My facility is gone—my hand has lost its cunning," than in
actual writing. By the time he was ready to leave we were all famished; so
before catching the owl car from Bowdoin Square we stopped at an all-
night restaurant that Fleetwood used to patronize when he was a reporter,
and had buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I 've never tasted anything so
good.
The Cambridge car was interesting, but fearful. It was jammed with
people, and I wondered where so many could have come from that hour of
the morning. They could n't all have been dramatic critics. The majority of
those who got seats went sound asleep, and as the conductor could n't very
well wake them up at every street, he found out beforehand where they
wanted to get off, and then hung little tags on their coats that told their
destination.

When we were saying good-by to Fleetwood in the Square, Berri
laughed and asked,—
"Have you decided yet what you 're going to do to me, Mr. Fleetwood?
I know you would like to give me E on my thesis, but I don't think I deserve
quite that." Instead of answering him, however, Mr. Fleetwood ran away,
exclaiming,—
"Don't talk shop,—don't talk shop; good-night,—good-night!"
Berri has begun to get awfully scared about the thesis,—not that he's
afraid that Fleetwood will give it a low mark, but because it does n't look at
present as if there would be anything to mark at all. I found him in his room
the other day with a pile of books and a scratch-block on his table. But he
had n't taken a note, and his attitude was one of utter despair. Of course he
can't possibly write it unless he stays here during the holidays, for they
begin day after to-morrow.

XI

I don't think I 've had a pen in my hand, except when I wrote a note to Berri,
for more than two weeks. In the first place I left in such a hurry to meet the
family in New York that, among the various things I forgot to pack at the
last minute, my diary was one. (Even if I had taken it, I probably shouldn't
have found time to record all we did.) Then, as I was with mamma and papa
and Mildred during the entire vacation, there was no necessity for writing
letters.
I did n't go to Washington with Berri for two reasons. The family
naturally wanted me to spend the holidays with them, and I could n't help

feeling that, if I refused Berri's kind invitation, he would be much more
likely to stay, part of the time at least, in Cambridge and write his thesis. In
a way I was right; for when I told him I simply could n't go with him, he
said sort of listlessly,—
"Well, then I suppose I ought to stay here and finish that thing, oughtn't
I?" which was an optimistic way of letting me know that it had n't even
been begun. I did n't know what to answer exactly, because if I 'd agreed
with him he would have thought me unsympathetic and looked hurt, and if I
had advised him to let the whole matter slide, and forget about it, and have
a good time (which was, of course, what he wanted me to do), I felt sure
that he would eventually blame me for giving him bad advice. That's Berri
all over. So I merely remarked, "You 'll have to be the judge; it 's too serious
a matter for any one else to meddle with," and felt like a nasty little prig as I
said it. He was restless and gloomy after that, and took a long walk all
alone, during which I 'm convinced that he very nearly made up his mind to
stay in Cambridge and slave. I say very nearly, because he didn't bring
himself quite to the point of telling anybody about it. But the next afternoon
(college closed with the last lecture of that day), when I turned into our
street on the way to my room, there was a cab with a steamer trunk on it
standing in front of our house; and as I opened the front door, Berri and a
dress-suit case clattered down the stairs. He stopped just long enough to
shake hands and exclaim, "Good-by, Granny—have a good time—I left a
note for you on your desk. The train goes in less than an hour." Then he
rushed out of the gate and jumped into the cab, slamming the door after him
with that sharp, thrilling "Now they're off" clack that cabs, and cabs only,
possess. That was the last I saw of him.
New York was a pleasing delirium of theatres and operas and
automobile rides up and down Fifth Avenue, with just enough rows between

Mildred and me, and papa and me and Mildred and mamma (the other
possible combinations never scrap), to make us realize that the family tie
was the same dear old family tie and had n't been in any way severed by my
long absence. It took us three days to persuade mamma to ride in an
automobile,—a triumph that we all lived bitterly to repent; for she ever
afterwards refused to be transported from place to place by any other
means,—which was not only inconvenient, but ruinous. She justified her
extravagance by declaring that in an emergency she preferred to be the
smasher to the smashed. I met lots of fellows I knew on the street, and some
of them took me home with them to luncheon or to that curious five-
o'clock-sit-around-and-don't-know-what-to-do-with-the-cup meal they call
"tea." Meeting their families was very nice, and I felt as if I knew the
fellows ever so much better than I did in Cambridge.
One incident might have ended in a tragedy if I hadn't happened to
preserve a certain letter of mamma's. ("Never write anything and never burn
anything—isn't it Talleyrand who tells us that?" as the friend of Berri's aunt
would say.) It was the real reason of our spending the last two days of the
vacation in Boston, and came about in the following way.
One day at luncheon (we were going to a matinée afterwards) I
glanced at my watch to see how late we were, and mamma noticed, for the
first time, that I was carrying a cheap nickel-plated alarm-clock sort of an
affair instead of the gold-faced heirloom that has been reposing for lo! these
many weeks in Mr. Hirsch's pawn-shop. Since our meeting she hadn't
referred to this painful subject, and as I had become used to the dollar watch
on the end of my chain, it never occurred to me to say anything about it.
That day she looked at the watch and then at me, and finally she murmured,
"Why, Tommy!" with the expression of one who seems to see the
foundations of Truth, Respectability, and Honor crumbling to dust; and she

finished her luncheon in silence, breathing in a resigned kind of way and
studying the table-cloth with eyes like smitten forget-me nots. On the way
upstairs I lagged behind, and Mildred said to me,—
"Mamma has on her early-Christian-martyr look. What on earth's the
matter now?" But I was unable to enlighten her. Mamma had known from
the first that the watch had been pawned; I could n't imagine why she was
so upset.
All was explained, however, when I went to her room. Some time ago
she had sent me a draft for thirty dollars. It came in a cheerful letter (no
letter containing a draft for thirty dollars is sad) about nothing in particular.
I remembered that at the time the postscript had puzzled me, for it said, "Of
course I have told your father nothing about this," and there was no clew in
the body of the letter to what "this" referred. The draft wasn't mentioned. It
seems that mamma was under the impression she had written me several
pages on the evils of extravagance, the horrors of debt, and the general
desirability of redeeming one's watch as soon as possible,—which she
hadn't at all. Not being a mind-reader, I assumed that her draft was a
spontaneous outburst of maternal esteem, had it cashed with a loving
grateful heart, and spent the money in three days. Therefore, when she
caught sight of my tin timepiece (it keeps much better time, by the way,
than the heirloom ever did), she had distressing visions of me indulging in a
perfect carnival of embezzlement, and finally ending up with shorn locks,
striped clothes, and a chain on my leg.
I never realized before that the human brain is perfectly capable, under
certain circumstances, of harboring two distinct beliefs at the same time,—
the truth of either one of which necessarily excludes the other. (There is
probably a more technical way of stating this, but I haven't got that far in
my philosophy course as yet.) Now, when I solemnly declared to mamma

that she had never mentioned her check in connection with my watch or
anything else in fact, I am sure she believed me. She said she believed me,
and seemed greatly relieved. But, on the other hand, although she knew I
was telling the truth, and rejoiced in the fact, I am certain that she was
unable at the same time to abandon her equally strong conviction that she
had written and sent precisely the letter she had intended to. I don't pretend
to explain this mental phenomenon, and I discreetly refrained from
discussing it with mamma, for in the midst of our talk I began to have a
dim, delicious suspicion that her letter was at that moment reposing in my
inside pocket. (When I am away from home, I always carry several plainly
addressed letters in order that there may be as little trouble as possible in
case anything should happen to me. I remembered having put the letter with
the postscript into my coat-pocket instead of my desk, as I wished to refer
to it when I next wrote home.) So, when mamma finally said, "Well, I
believe you," and then added with an air of abstraction, "But I wish you had
saved that letter," I thrust my hand into my pocket, glanced at several
envelopes, and exclaimed dramatically as I showed her one of them,—
"Madam, your most idle whim is my inexorable law." Then we all
went to the matinée.
But that wasn't the end of the watch. Mamma made me give her the
pawn-ticket, and insisted on going home by way of Boston for the purpose
of redeeming it herself. The reason of this change in the family plans was
not explained to Mildred and papa; but they were docile, and seemed to
think it would be very nice to see my rooms before leaving for home.
There was no opportunity to visit Mr. Hirsch when we arrived
yesterday, as we spent most of the day in exploring Cambridge. But this
morning (they all left for the West this afternoon), while Mildred was
packing and papa had gone to see about tickets, mamma, with her head

swathed in a thick black veil, and I slipped out to go to the pawnbroker's. I
have an idea that by going herself instead of simply sending me mamma
had a vague but noble belief that she was rescuing me somehow from moral
shipwreck. And then, no doubt, the mere fact of one's venturing out
incognito, as it were, to wrest ancestral relics from usurious fingers is not
without a certain charm.
Well, of course we met papa at the door of the hotel. The ticket-office
was just around the corner, and he had engaged berths and tickets with a
rapidity that was as unfortunate as it was incredible, for he greeted us with,
"Starting for a walk? I'm just in time," and proceeded to join the expedition
with evident pleasure. Mamma lingered uneasily on the sidewalk a moment,
and then said,—
"We 're not going for amusement, dear; we 're going to shop. You
know how that always tires you." But papa, who was in good spirits at the
prospect of leaving for home, quite unsuspiciously ignored the suggestion
and replied cheerily,—
"Well, I think I 'll go along, I might want to buy something myself."
I exclaimed, "How jolly!" in a sepulchral tone, and we started.
Now, mamma in the role of a gay deceiver is sublime. The fact that she
is trying to play a part and perhaps setting "an awful example" makes her
miserable, although she sometimes succeeds in concealing the fact until
afterwards. I saw that we were in for a delightful morning, and would
probably end by missing the train. We loitered unscrupulously in front of
shop windows, apparently entranced by everything from hardware to cigars.
We sauntered in and out of countless dry-goods places in quest of dark-blue
ribbon of such an unusual shade that Boston had never seen its like; we
paused for half an hour, now and then, to inquire the price of diamond tiaras
and alabaster clocks set with rhinestones; we bought a bouquet of frost-

bitten roses (I had to carry it) from a one-armed man, and tarried to hear his
reminiscences of life in a sawmill; we went to pianola recitals, phonograph
exhibits, and assisted at an auction sale of bar-room furniture. And papa
wearied not. Mamma and I were nearly dead, but he not only wasn't bored,
—he seemed to be having the time of his life. We could n't devise anything
too silly and futile and tiresome for him to enjoy, and as the time before the
train left was beginning to grow ominously short, mamma at last resorted to
heroic measures.
I don't think she had formed any definite plan when she abruptly led us
into the subway; but our going there was probably not unconnected in her
imagination with the boundless opportunities for losing oneself in the
sewers of Paris and the catacombs of Rome. The subway may or may not
resemble these historic places,—I'm sure I don't know,—but, at any rate,
after we had been there five or six minutes we lost papa.
We all three had stood aimlessly watching the cars whizz up to the
platform and away again into the subterranean dusk, until papa (this was his
first sign of impatience) mildly remarked, "I think, dear, that as you and
Tommy seem to be rather attached to this place, I 'll buy a newspaper."
Then he strolled off, and mamma clutched me. We watched him approach
the news-stand and pick up a magazine. His back was partly turned.
"It 's our only chance," said mamma hoarsely, with a half-guilty, half-
affectionate glance towards the news-stand. I understood and, seizing her
hand, ran with her to the nearest car. An instant later we were buzzing
through the bowels of the earth in quite the opposite direction from the
pawn-shop.
To tell the truth, the only thing I knew about the locality of Mr.
Hirsch's establishment was that we should never reach it unless we got out
and took a car going the other way. This we did, and when I thought we had

gone far enough on the return trip and we emerged once more into the
daylight, we seemed to be miles from the place—the only place—from
which I could have found my way. So we jumped into a cab and told the
man to drive as quickly as he could to that place. (I had to describe it at
some length, as I don't as yet know the names of many streets here.) He was
very intelligent, however, and it was n't his fault that, after we had jolted
along for four or five blocks, the horse fell down. We left him lifting one of
the poor thing's nervous hind legs in and out of the tangled harness. He
looked as if he were trying to solve some kind of a gigantic, hopeless
puzzle. We hurried on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I suddenly
discovered that we had been in the right street all the time. It was one of
those queer streets that never look familiar when you 're going the other
way. I confess it took a great deal of courage to impart this discovery to
mamma; but she appreciated the fact that we had very little time to lose, and
did n't stop to point out to me that if I ever become a business man, I 'll be a
failure. The horse was on his feet again when we got back to the cab, so we
jumped in once more, and after an interminable drive (half of me was out of
the window most of the time, like a Punch-and-Judy doll, directing the
cabman) we finally drew up in front of the pawn-shop. It was then that we
really distinguished ourselves.
"I've come for my watch," I said to Mr. Hirsch. He gave me the look of
a bird of prey. It reminded me of an eagle I had seen once,—an eagle that
had been stuffed by an amateur. He held out his hand and spoke a solitary,
fateful word. Mamma's face—in the excitement of the moment she had
pushed up her veil—became dim with horror; her features for an instant
were positively incoherent.
"The ticket?" she whispered gropingly. "It's in the bottom of my
trunk."

Mildred and papa and a group of porters, peering up and down the
street like a concourse of Sister Annes, were on the curbstone in front of the
hotel when we got back. The baggage was piled on a wagon, papa looked
haggard and years older than when I had last seen him, and Mildred gave us
a haughty stare as we alighted. Mamma was hustled wildly from the cab to
the carriage, and I had time merely to peck hastily at their tense faces and
gasp good-by. As the carriage swung around the corner, mamma appeared
for a moment at the window, exclaiming, "I 'll send it to you in my first
letter," and then sank from view. This afternoon, when I returned to my
peaceful little abode in Cambridge, who should be in his room but Berri?
He was at his desk, bending earnestly over a big pad of thesis paper.
"You've finished it, after all," I said, for the floor near his chair was
littered with neat manuscript.
"Yes, it's finished,—fifty beastly pages of it," Berri answered, as he
jumped up to meet me. I wanted to ask him all about it,—how he had
managed to do it during the gayeties of Washington, and if it had taken
much time. But he said rather wearily,—
"Oh, don't let's talk about it; I 'm so sick of it," and began at once to
question me about my trip to New York. We chatted for about half an hour,
and then I got up to go into my room and unpack my trunk. Thesis paper is
n't like the ordinary paper on which themes are written; it has a margin on
all four sides, and as I had never used any, I went over to Berri's desk to
examine a sheet of his.
"Why, you 've had the thing type-written," I exclaimed; for there was a
pile of type-written notes in front of the thesis paper. "Why don't you hand
it in that way instead of copying it again? Your hand is so hard to read."
Berri wrinkled his forehead in a queer, annoyed kind of way; then he
looked confused and blushed a little, and finally he gave an uncomfortable

laugh.
"Oh, Granny, you 're so brutally guileless," he murmured. "Why can't
you just see and understand things? It sounds so much worse than it really
is, when you make me say it in so many words." Even then I didn't
altogether grasp the situation.
"You mean that somebody helped you?" I asked. That did n't seem to
me worth making such a fuss about, somehow.
"Well, that's a very refined and ladylike way of putting it," he
answered. "I got a man in the Law School to write it for me, and paid him
ten dollars for his trouble."
I had never thought much about this sort of thing, and it was
impossible all at once to know just where I stood in the matter. I didn't
know what to say, and I think I blurted out,—
"Oh, Berri, I 'm so sorry."
"Well, I 'm sorry you know about it," Berri mused drearily. "No, I 'm
not, either," he added quickly, after a moment; "I 'm darned glad,—for now
that you know, you can do what you like; I 'm not playing the hypocrite,
anyhow. Only, don't talk to me about it. I 've thought the whole thing over
from every point of view; it's the only thing I can do. I 'm willing to run the
risks, and I 'm going to do it."
It was impossible to go back to other topics after that, so I went into
my room and unpacked my trunk. I don't believe I ever unpacked so
carefully and put everything away so neatly before. Mrs. Chester came in
and complimented me as I was finishing. It must have been because I was
thinking.
With all my thinking, however, I can't say that I 've got much farther
than I was when Berri first told me. I simply know that he oughtn't to have
done it, and am very, very sorry that he has. If he tried to defend himself in

any way, I could have it out with him; but he does n't. When he finished
copying the thesis, he came into my room and said, "I 'm going over to drop
this through Fleetwood's door; do you want to go along?" and I went with
him, hoping that at the last minute he might, in his unexpected way, change
his mind. On the way over he did burst out with,—
"You see, it's this way: If I didn't know Fleetwood so well, I should n't
do it; I shouldn't care. But he'll think, if I fail to hand in the written work,
that I'm presuming on the fact that we 've breakfasted together at The Holly
Tree and gone to the theatre and all that. I hate that kind of thing." I tried to
make him see that Fleetwood would n't look at it in this way at all, and that
even if he did it would be his fault, not Berri's. But Berri answered: "You
need n't go on to tell me how dishonest it is,—I know all that. I 'm not
worse than lots of other people, though;" and by that time we had reached
Fleetwood's door. I put my hand on his arm as he was about to drop the
thesis through Fleetwood's letter-slide and said, "Please don't, Berri; wait
until to-morrow morning, anyhow;" but he pushed the roll through the door,
and as it fell with a thud inside, he laughed and answered,—
"Too late. Now I'm going to forget about it." He went to town for
dinner, and I had mine about an hour ago at Mrs. Brown's. I was the only
one there. In a few minutes I have to go out again, as I promised——

Later.

Just as I had written that far, the front door opened and slammed and the tin
steps clattered as they only do when Duggie is coming up. The loneliness of
the house, and the feeling that college opened to-morrow, and Duggie on
the stairs all took me back to my first evening in Cambridge. The only

difference was that instead of going to his own room Duggie this time came
bursting into mine.
"I came to say good-by," he exclaimed; and when I got over my
astonishment, he went on to tell me that he had decided during the vacation
to go away—to Europe—and stay until Class Day. He had never told me
before that he had taken his degree in three years, and that it would n't have
been necessary for him to come back this year at all if he had n't wanted to.
He has been entitled to his degree for months; but of course he is anxious to
graduate with his own class in the spring. He has n't talked to any one about
going abroad, as he was n't sure of it until a few days ago.
"I 'm leaving on the midnight train to-night," he said, "and I came out
here on the chance of your having got back. My family are all in the
country, I left them this afternoon." I wanted to tell him how sorry I was
that he was leaving us, and how glad I was that he could go; but somehow I
don't think I showed what I really felt. The time was so short (I had
promised Duncan Duncan to help him with some Advocate editorials at half
past eight), and those things never seem to sound the way I should like to
have them. But in a way I had an opportunity to let him know how I felt
toward him, for while we were sitting there, he laughed and said,—
"As you won't stay and talk to me, I think you might at least do the
next best thing. You know I 've always wanted to read this, and now that I
'm going away, you ought to let me." Then he took my diary from the
mantelpiece and pretended to read the first page.
My first impulse was to ask him not to. If he had been going to stay in
Cambridge, I should n't have let him, of course; but as he was leaving in a
few hours and seemed anxious to read the thing, and as it really did n't
make any difference whether he did or not, I finally let him.

"I don't see why you want to, and you probably won't get beyond the
first few pages, but you may," I said.
So I left him by the fire with the diary in his hand. I thought perhaps I
should find a note about it when I got back this evening, but I didn't.

XII

Poor Berri! I felt so sorry for him. I do yet, in fact; for although things can't
possibly turn out in the way he thinks they may, I can't tell him so, and he
lives in a state of perpetual dread. But it won't last long now; Duggie's
steamer must have almost reached Southampton by this time, and it won't
take more than a week or eight days for Berri to hear from Duggie himself.
I came very near giving the thing away at one time. It's hard not to,
although I realize that Duggie was wise when he asked me to let matters
take their course.
It just happened that the next day after Berri had delivered his thesis,
the talk at luncheon turned on cheating at exams and handing in written
work that is n't your own. The sentiment against cheating seemed to be
strong, partly from a sense of honor and partly from a sense of risk. As a
matter of fact, I don't see how fellows can very well manage to cheat here—
during an examination, that is to say—even if they want to. There are
always a lot of proctors prowling up and down the room, ready to jump on
anybody who has suspicious-looking bits of paper on his desk, or who
seems to be unduly interested in his lap or the condition of his cuffs. And
then, besides, assuming that the instructor occasionally gets absorbed in a
newspaper and the proctors stroll to the windows to watch the muckers

throwing snowballs in the Yard, how could a student prepare himself for
this rare opportunity? It may be different in courses that involve the exact
sciences, where certain definite formulas copied on a small bit of paper
might be of use; but in the sort of things I take, one would have to conceal
upon oneself the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ploetz's Epitome of History,
Geschmitzenmenger's Ancient Art, or the Dictionary of Biography, in order
to accomplish any really effective deception.
With written work it seems to be easier. If a man hands in a theme or a
thesis in his own hand, the instructors are more or less forced to accept it as
original, unless of course it was taken outright from a book and they happen
to be familiar with the book. From what the fellows at the table said, there
must be more of this sort of thing done than I had imagined; although, since
Berri opened my eyes, I could believe almost anything. One of the fellows
told about a student—a Junior—he had heard of who succeeded in getting
himself fired two or three years ago in a rather complicated way. He was
engaged, and his lady-love sent him a poem in one of her letters, saying that
she had written it for him. The letter arrived while he was struggling with a
daily theme; so he murmured to himself, "Tush! I 'll copy Araminta's pretty
verses and send them in as my own; as they have just gushed from her
surcharged heart into her letter, no one will be the wiser." A few days later
the omnivorous Advocate asked permission to print them, and as they had
received words of praise from the instructor, and as the fellow by that time
had no doubt begun to believe he had written them himself, he allowed
them to be published under his name. Somebody sent a copy of the
Advocate to Araminta, who replied with an indignant letter to her futur; and
while he was trying to think up an explanation of the matter with which to
pacify her, somebody else came out in the Crimson with a most withering
communication, asking how the Advocate dared to print as original a poem

that had been written by his grandfather, the late Donovan H. Dennison,
whose complete poetical works ("Dan Cupid and other Idyls") could be
found in the college library at any time. Whereupon the student, disgusted
at his lady-love's dishonesty in palming off the late Donovan H. Dennison's
verses as original, broke his engagement; and the college, disgusted with
the student for precisely the same reason, "separated" him (to use the suave
official phrase) from the University.
There was, as I said, a great deal of talk at luncheon that day about
cheating. Some of the men seemed to think the presence of proctors during
an exam was insulting; but, as Bertie Stockbridge remarked,—and this
struck me as unanswerable,—"If you don't cheat yourself and don't want to,
what difference does it make whether they 're there or not? And if you do
cheat, why, of course, proctors are necessary." In the matter of dishonest
written work the same honorable sentiments were expressed. Everybody
was sincere, but I could n't help realizing a little that they could not have
had very much temptation as yet. If it had n't been for Berri, I probably
should have laid down the law as loudly as the rest. But he sat there eating
in silence, irritated and oppressed by so much high-minded babbling, and I
hated to hurt him by adding to it. Usually he is one of the last to leave the
table. That day, however, he hurried through his luncheon and slipped away
alone.
Oh dear! (How silly those two words look written down, and yet it was
what was passing through my mind as I wrote them.) I suppose that what I
really mean is, How tiresome it is that a person's acts don't begin and end
with himself! There doesn't seem to be any limit to the reach of their
influence. It would be so much more simple and easy if you knew just
where the consequences of a mistake or an indiscretion, or whatever you
choose to call it, began and ended. Now, for instance, take Berri and the

thesis. Of course, I think it was all wrong, and was sorry he handed it in; but
I wasn't going to let it make any difference in my feelings toward Berri. As
far as I am concerned, I don't think it has made a difference. Yet the beastly
thing cast a sort of gloom over the house. For Berri after luncheon that day
rather avoided the table in general and me in particular. What his object was
in doing this, I don't know. It was probably just a feeling on his part; but it
made me feel as if I 'd been putting myself on a moral pedestal somehow,
and that Berri saw in me a perpetual accusation. Our relations became
indescribably changed and sort of formal, and I did n't see how I could
make them different. What could I have done? There was nothing, under the
circumstances, for me to say. He stopped in my room that night to warm
himself for a minute before going to bed, but I don't think he said anything
except that it was snowing outside.
The next day we had the blizzard. People here usually assume that in
the part of the country I come from we have nine months of winter and
three of cold weather. But nevertheless I had to come to the staid and
temperate East to see the kind of a winter storm you read about in books,—
the regular old "Wreck of the Hesperus" kind, in which the crew are "swept
like icicles from the deck," and able-bodied men get hopelessly lost and are
frozen to death in their own front yards. I was to have dined in town that
night with Hemington, who had tickets for a Paderewski recital. But he did
n't turn up, so I joined some fellows who found me in the restaurant eating
alone, and afterwards went to the theatre with them. It was snowing when
we left the restaurant; in fact, great, wet cottony flakes had been falling at
intervals all day. (It reminded me of those marvellous paper weights I
haven't seen for years and years,—glass globes filled with water in which a
white, powdery sediment swirls and drifts and finally settles in the most
lifelike way on a beautiful little tin landscape. What's become of them all, I

wonder?) But there was no wind, and it was n't particularly cold, so I don't
think that anybody suspected what was going to happen before the show
was over.
It took an unusually long time to get out of the theatre that night; the
people in the aisles hardly moved at all. But after we had forced our way
through the crowd, and climbed over seats, and finally reached the narrow
corridor leading to the entrance, we saw why it was. The ones who had got
to the door first were afraid to leave. Within an hour or two the wind had
risen and risen until it screamed through the streets, blasting up the fallen
snow in wild bewildering spirals and then fiercely slapping it back again in
slants of hard, biting cold. From the door of the theatre it was impossible to
see beyond the curbstone, except when the half-obliterated lights of a cab
lurched by over the drifts. The rumor went through the crowd that the wires
were down and that all the cars had stopped. No one seemed to know quite
what to do. Just as the people nearest the door would make up their minds
to start bravely out, a thick hurricane would strike erratically in at them,
causing the ladies to shrink back with little exclamations of dismay.
Nobody's carriage had arrived, and the few cabs that appeared ploughed
laboriously past us. Our crowd waited a few moments,—more to share the
excitement of the others than for anything else; then we turned up our
collars and plunged out.
Standing at the door of the theatre, the world outside had seemed to me
to be in a sort of insane uproar; but as soon as we got away from the human
babble, and I lifted my head and opened my eyes and deliberately relaxed
my ears, so to speak, I found the city almost solemnly silent. Every now and
then, when we came to a cross street or turned a corner, there was, it is true,
a sudden shriek and a sort of rattle of fine stinging ice particles; but as long
as I could keep myself from being confused inside of me, while we were

floundering over drifts and burrowing with our heads through the walls of
wind that blocked the way and seemed to be falling on us, I could n't help
noticing the terrible muffledness of everything. It was as if the place were
being swamped, blotted out, suffocated.
When we reached the hotel where we had dined earlier in the evening,
the other fellows went in to have something to eat, but for several reasons I
decided not to. In the first place, I promised papa that I would try to
economize, and I had already unexpectedly squandered two dollars on a
theatre ticket, owing to Hemington's failure to appear. Then I felt that if I
did n't make a dash for Cambridge right away, I should n't get there at all.
(As a matter of fact, I never did reach there until nine the next morning, but
it was n't because I did n't try hard enough. The other fellows put up at the
hotel.) So I just shouted that I was going on, and as we were all about half
frozen, no one stopped to persuade me not to.
Well, I found a string of cars about a mile long that were rapidly
turning into Esquimau huts, and was told by one of the conductors that
something had broken down ahead, and that, as the snow-plough could n't
get by, they probably would n't move again until morning. He thought,
however, that the other line was running; and I started to grope my way to
Bowdoin Square.
I would n't go through that experience again for gold and precious
stones; and I can't imagine now why I did it in the first place, except that I
had acquired by that time a kind of pig-headed determination to reach
Cambridge, and did n't know what I was in for. It was n't so bad while I was
staggering along by the side of the blocked cars; they were lighted, and I
knew that if I changed my mind about going on, I could pop into one of
them and be safe. But when I passed the last one and found myself after a
while among back streets choked with drifts, and could n't see my way, and

fell down twice, and got snow up my sleeves, and my face and hands and
feet pained so with cold that I could n't help crying (actually), and I realized
at last that I did n't in the least know where I was, I began to be panic-
stricken. I 'm not the huskiest person in the world, and all at once the wind
blew me smash against an iron railing and almost into a basement of some
kind. I think I should have hunted for a door-bell and tried to get into a
house if I hadn't a moment later collided with a policeman (fell down
again), who helped me up and led me to a sheltered place behind a wall,
where I managed to collect myself and tell him what I was looking for. He
too was on his way to Bowdoin Square; so after that I just hung on to his
coat most of the time, and tried to keep my legs in motion without really
knowing much where he was leading me or whether we were making any
progress. Once there was a rip-tearing crash over our heads. The policeman
jumped aside, and then stopped to exclaim, "Well, I never seen the likes o'
that." I think a sign had blown off a building through a plate-glass window.
Farther on a dangling wire romped in the wind. It spat dazzling blue and
purple at us until we retreated and went around another way, muttering
strange Hibernian mutters. When I opened my eyes again, we were in front
of the hotel in Bowdoin Square and the policeman was advising me through
his frozen mustache not to go to Cambridge. He said the cars had stopped
long ago. So I said good-by to him and was just stumbling into the café,
when who should come out but Berri and a cabman? They had gone in to
get warm before starting across the bridge.
"I 'm not sure that we can make it," Berri said, "but the man says he's
willing to try. I 'll tell you why I don't want to stay at the hotel when we get
inside. Look out—look out!" he cried to me, as I opened the cab door and
was about to jump in. I drew back, expecting at least to be decapitated or
electrocuted, and then Berri explained that he was afraid I might "sit on the

pigeons." He entered the cab first, and removed some indistinguishable
objects from the back seat to the narrow seat that lifts up in front. "That's
why I can't very well stay at the hotel," he went on. "As soon as these poor
exhausted little darlings begin to thaw, they 'll fly around and make a
dreadful fuss. I 'd rather have them in my own room." He had picked up
four half frozen pigeons in the street on his way to the Square, and had
carried them—two in his pockets and two in the bosom of his overcoat—
until he came across the cab. After we got started, he lighted matches every
now and then to see how they were getting along, and we took turns at
blowing on their pink feet, all shrivelled with cold. One of them, to Berri's
grief, was dead, but by the time the cab stopped suddenly and for the last
time in the middle of the bridge (it had been going slower and slower and
tipping more perilously over mounds of snow as we proceeded), the other
three looked scared and intelligent and began to feel warm under their
wings.
The driver opened the door and said he could n't go on, as a fallen wire
was sagging across the street in front of the horse's nose. We jumped out,
and Berri was just about to seize the thing and try to lift it over the horse's
head, when I remembered the murderous ecstasy of the other one and jerked
him back. Ahead of us there was a drift almost as high as the cab itself, and
the man said that even without the wire we never could drive over or
through it. So, after a short consultation, he decided to blanket his nag and
spend the rest of the night in the cab; the horse was "dead beat," he said,
and he very much doubted if it could pull back to town against the wind
even after turning around, which was a more or less impossible undertaking
in itself. Berri and I packed up the pigeons—the dead one included, as Berri
remembered having read in the paper that morning of a case of "suspended

animation" somewhere in Texas—and pushed on to the waiting-station at
the other end of the bridge.
That was a queer night. I was simply played out when I got inside the
waiting-room, and I had n't been there more than a few minutes when I
discovered that my ear was frozen. A kind, officious woman all but broke it
off rubbing snow on it; but though it pained excruciatingly during the night
and is still sensitive and has a tendency to stick out at right angles from my
head, I think it will recover. There must have been fifteen or twenty people
cooped up in the waiting-room and the cigar-stand (with hot soda-water and
candy facilities) next door. Some of them were cross and unhappy, and
some of them were facetious. One of them had a small dog. Berri's pigeons
created a sensation. The cigar-man gave us a box to put them under, and
Berri bought them popcorn for fear they might be hungry during the night.
The warmth of the room revived them completely, all but the dead one.
We talked for a while; but as Berri remembered, now that the
excitement was over, to be formal and impersonal once more, it was rather
dreary. We could have slept, I think,—in fact we were asleep, when one of
the facetious refugees woke us up to ask if we did n't want to join him "and
some other gentlemen in a game of euchre." Disappointed at his
unsuccessful efforts to interest people in this diversion, he chased the little
dog about the room, declaring that he intended to tie a glass of chocolate
around its neck and send it out in the storm to look for travellers who had
lost their way. It was impossible after that to get to sleep again.
We had been sitting with our heads against the wall for almost an hour,
waiting for daylight, when Berri, who hadn't said anything for ever so long,
suddenly came out with,—
"Oh, Granny, I 'm so sorry I did it!" I knew what he meant at once,
although the thesis had n't been in my mind at all, and I was just about to

advise him to have a talk with Fleetwood and tell him everything, when he
added that he would have to stand by himself now, as it was too late to draw
back.
The worst of the storm was over, the cabman had come in to get warm
and tell us that his horse had frozen to death, and the windows of the
waiting-room had begun to look pale instead of black, by the time I
convinced Berri that it wasn't too late, and that as soon as we got to
Cambridge he ought to go to The Holly Tree and wait until Fleetwood came
in for his breakfast. When he finally made up his mind to do this, I never
saw any one in such a state of impatience. He could n't sit still, and kept
running to the door every other minute to see if the snow-plough was
coming over the bridge. Once he suggested that we should walk; but
although the morning was clear and beautiful, I had had enough of
struggling through mountains of snow the night before, and refused. The
plough appeared at last, preceded by a whirling cloud and followed by a car.
We set the pigeons free (Berri told them all to return with olive branches as
quickly as possible) and watched them fly to the nearest telegraph-pole and
proceed to make their toilets for the day.
It must have been about half an hour after I parted with Berri (he went
on to The Holly Tree and I came to my room) that he bounded up the stairs,
pale with excitement. He had met Fleetwood, and after a few preliminary
remarks about the blizzard (the whole place was submerged) he had blurted
out,—
"Mr. Fleetwood, I want to tell you something about my thesis; I did n't
write it." To which the instructor replied almost indifferently,—
"Yes, I noticed that. What was the trouble?" Berri just looked at him in
amazement.
"I said I did n't write it," he faltered.

"Well, I know that," Fleetwood replied a trifle sharply. He was inclined
to be "peevish," Berri said, because the morning papers had n't been
delivered.
"But I want to tell you how sorry I am," Berri added; the situation was
much worse, Berri says, than it would have been if Fleetwood had seemed
more impressed by his dishonesty. As a matter of fact, Fleetwood merely
smiled.
"Oh, I never had the vaguest idea that you would write it," he remarked
airily. "But if you don't care, I don't. It's much easier for me to give you an
E for having failed to hand it in, than it is to read fifty or sixty pages of your
impossible writing."
At this Berri said he almost reeled from his chair.
"Did n't I hand it in?" he asked, while his heart thumped painfully.
Fleetwood glanced up from his oatmeal only long enough to say,—
"I wish you would go some place else to eat; you bother me." But
Berri insisted.
"Dear Mr. Fleetwood," he pleaded eagerly, "please answer me just that
one thing. Did n't you find my thesis pushed through your door?" At this
Fleetwood put his hands to his head, as he always does when he 's
pretending that we 're trying to drive him mad, and moaned,—
"First you tell me you have n't written your thesis and then you ask me
if I 've picked it up on my floor. Oh, go away, go away! I shall never be able
to finish my breakfast and get back through all that ghastly snow to my ten-
o'clock lecture." Then Berri dashed out, forgetting to pay for his breakfast,
and came to find me.
Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the
instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of
lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time,

running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask
if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time
neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is
existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind
something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will
turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.
Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's
footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much
beyond hoping that the thesis—like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas
at the Bowdoin Square Theatre—wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after
an elapse of twenty years.
I had to leave him alone part of the afternoon. Duncan Duncan sent me
word that he was sick and that the Advocate was in dire need. So I
floundered through the alley to the printing-office, and learned from the
proof-reader that they had to have six inches of poetry immediately or the
paper would be very much delayed. I did n't know what to do, as we had n't
any poems of that length in stock, so to speak. While I was sitting there in
despair, one of the printers gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, and said,
—
"Here, hurry up and write a couple of sticks of po'try; I want to go
home." He was quite serious; so I got to work, and in about fifteen minutes
had written twenty lines about the pigeons in the blizzard; only I referred to
them, for various technical reasons, as doves. There was a heavenly smell
of printer's ink in the place which made it easier to write somehow.
No letters came that day from any direction on account of the storm.
The next afternoon I met the postman on the steps. He stopped to chat, and I
thought I should grab the letters from his hand before he finished, as I
caught sight of one in Duggie's handwriting addressed to me. I thought of

course that he had postponed his trip and had written to tell me why. The
postman talked on and on, but he told me one tale that interested me in spite
of myself.
One Sunday morning old Professor Pallas (my ally in the
hieroglyphics course) went over to the post-office for his letters. He must
have been thinking very deeply about recent discoveries or cuneiform
inscriptions or some such thing, because when he went up to the window he
could n't remember whose letters he had come for. So he said to the clerk,—
"Young man, do you know who I am?"
The clerk unfortunately was a new one, and had to confess, with
regret, that he did n't. So Professor Pallas, after a moment or two of
reflection, looked up and murmured through the window,—
"I ask you this because I am equally at a loss myself; but perhaps if I
take a little walk it may come to me." Then he strolled away, and in about
ten minutes returned, very much pleased, with a slip of paper in his hand.
"I remembered it all by myself," he exclaimed, "and wrote it down."
I got Duggie's letter at last, and ran upstairs to read it. This is what it
said:—

DEAR GRANNY,—We are steaming slowly out of the harbor, and I am
sitting in a sheltered corner of the deck writing you this note for the pilot to
take back with him. My fingers are stiff with cold, but as the air down
below is thick with what Mrs. Chester calls "floral tributes." I 'd rather stay
here and say good-by to you and the Goddess of Liberty at the same time.
What I wish particularly to do, however, is to thank you for letting me
read your diary last night (I have some things to say about it—the parts
where I come in, I mean—but that can wait) and to make a confession.
When I got to the last page, where the ink was scarcely dry, I dashed over to
Fleetwood's room, although I had lingered so long in your room I did n't
have any too much time in which to catch my train. Fortunately there was a
light in Fleetwood's window. While I was talking to him I saw out of the
corner of my eye the great pile of—is the plural "theses" or "thesises"?—on
his desk, and when he went into his bedroom for a minute to get a book for
me to read going over, I sniped Berri's performance from the top of the pile
and stuck it in my pocket. I did it on the impulse of the moment, and I may
have been all wrong—I don't know; the whole thing worries me. But don't
say anything to Berri about it. I should n't care to get you and the diary into
trouble. When I reach Southampton I 'll send the thing back to him with a
letter. Good-by, Granny. Take care of yourself and write often.

DUGGIE.

XIII

Some day I 'm going to write a book about Boston, because it's the most
wonderful place in the world. I suppose I really mean by this that it is so
different from Perugia. Berri, of course, would have to help me,—that is, he
would unless I lived here fifty or sixty years for the purpose of gathering
notes. It would take about that long to understand everything and be able to
write intelligently and sympathetically. Anybody, of course, may sojourn for
a time among the Bostonians—just as he may among the Chinese or the
strange races of the Pacific islands—and record his impressions of them.
But I don't think his remarks would be more valuable than the ordinary
travel book that tells you merely the things you could tell yourself if you
were on the spot with a pencil and a strong right arm. Really to know the
place you have to be born and brought up here; which in itself amounts to
saying that Boston will never, never be understood. For the people who
were born and brought up here know and won't tell,—"know and can't tell,"
Berri declares. "It would take a genius to do the thing properly," he says,
"and Boston went out of the genius business some thirty or forty years ago."
Now, Berri was born in Paris ("Paa-is, France—or Paa-is, Kentucky?"
as a Southern girl once asked him), and I don't suppose he's a genius,
actually. But as he has, on his mother's side, more cousins and aunts and
things in Boston than anybody I 'm ever likely to know so very intimately,
and as he seems more like a genius than anybody I 've ever seen before,
what he tells me always sounds somehow as if it were the real thing. He
laughed, though, the other day—we were taking a long walk—when I said
this to him, and answered that it was very evident I did n't know what the
real thing was.
"I'm not," he added, "if for no other reason than that I am able, quite
seriously at times, to consider going some place else to live after I finish
with all this." And he fluttered his hand in the direction of Cambridge.

"Does n't anybody else?" I asked.
"Mercy, no—how you talk!" he exclaimed. "Why should they?"
"I suppose I was thinking of papa," I replied meekly. "He believes it's
better for most young men to get away from home and start life for
themselves as soon as they grow up; they 're always boys to somebody
unless they do, he says. Then, besides, he has great faith in perfectly new
places. He 's often told me that even Perugia was too old and crowded for a
young man. Perugia was fifty-three years old last spring." Berri laughed.
"That's important, if true," he answered, "but what has it to do with
Boston?"
"Why, I merely imagined that some one in this part of the world might
have the same idea," I suggested. "Now, take Duggie, for instance. Don't
you think that Duggie wants to get out and try to do something?"
"Oh, Duggie!" said Berri, with a shrug. "He thinks he does now, but he
really doesn't. Of course Duggie is simply slopping over with strenuousness
and that sort of thing. But he gets most of it out of books,—Fleetwood's
books at that. And after all, as I say, he slops over; it 'll just run into the sand
without making even a silly little hole. After a while, when he gets tired of
reading, and thinking how unworthy everybody else is, it won't do even
that. Duggie in college is stunning and a leader of men; but Duggie at forty
will be leading nothing but a beautiful purple life down there at his country-
place,—unless, of course, he gets fat; if he gets fat, he 'll be a stockbroker."
"Say, Berri, how old are you, anyhow?" I asked. I know he is older
than I am, but he never will tell me how much,—he didn't this time,—he
just laughs, and says his early education was grossly neglected over there in
Europe, or he would have been classes and classes ahead of me. I did n't
like what he said about Duggie, and told him so. He answered that I 'd
brought it on myself, and I suppose I had.

"Maybe we'd better talk about Bertie Stockbridge," he added. "He's my
third cousin, you know—but, dear me, if people begin to be loyal to third
cousins, Boston would turn into a sort of gigantic asylum for deaf mutes. I
don't mind what you say about Bertie. Besides, he 's a more perfect
specimen than Duggie, because Duggie is passing through a phase. Even
Bostonians sometimes pass through phases when they 're very young. It
doesn't happen often, though. The truth is, Duggie can't decide whether to
be a Greek god or a college settlement. He'd really rather be a Greek god,
only it's so immoral. He 'll probably end, you know, by coming out of his
trance some June morning and finding himself married. Then it will be too
late to be either one or the other. But what was it we were talking about?
Oh, yes—Bertie. Now, Bertie isn't passing through a phase. Not on your
life. Bertie just rose Venus-like in a state of hopeless completion from the
crystal waters of the Back Bay. He never disappoints."
"But I like Bertie," I protested; "not as much as I do Duggie, of course.
But I do like him; he's so—so—sensible."
"Sensible!" Berri screamed. "Why, child, the Stockbridge family is all
sense. With trousers bagging at the knee and Adam's apples rising and
falling above their abashed collars, Bertie's ancestors came into a lovely
foolish world and created sense. That's all they ever do now,—just create
one another and sense. So, the next time you hear some old thing groaning
about the scarcity of common-sense, you 'll know that it's because the
Stockbridges have it all,—they and a few friends who live in the same street
during the winter and share several thousand front feet of the Atlantic
Ocean from May to November. But you mustn't think I don't like Bertie and
his family,—perhaps I should simply say 'Bertie,' for Bertie is his family,—
because I do, you know. I admire him very much," Berri added after a
moment. "He radiates a sort of atmosphere of modest infallibility that

makes me feel exactly as I should feel if I suddenly went into Appleton
Chapel and found the Pope there reading the Boston Transcript. Calmly and
without the slightest tinge of bitterness, I admit that Bertie is always right.
"You heard what he said to Bobbie Colburn, didn't you? It was after
the hour exam in English 68, and we were all in Bobbie's room comparing
notes. Now, Bertie had passed, of course, because he 'll always pass in
everything, whether he has any talent for it or not; but he had n't passed
particularly well. It takes a person of some imagination to get a good mark
in that course. Bobbie Colburn, on the other hand, who apparently hadn't
studied at all and who'd been having a fierce time the night before the exam,
just sailed into the examination-room with a dress-suit on under his
overcoat, and got through brilliantly, which worried Bertie to death. We 'd
all made some comment on the matter, and finally Colburn, as if to end it,
said in his breezy way, 'Well, you know the old proverb,—He laughs best
who drinks most!' Whereupon Bertie fixed him with his fine gray eyes and
remarked, 'That is n't the way it goes, Colburn; you 've got it mixed.' Then
he repeated the words correctly,—not with triumph exactly, but with the
cold joy of one whose life is spent in righting unimportant wrongs.
"And yet I can't help confessing," Berri mused, "that I 'm exceedingly
glad to acknowledge my relationship to Bertie and his tribe. They madden
me at times; they have such clear, narrow, unelastic, admirable intellects.
Their attitude toward all questions, public or private, is so definite and
uncompromising; they 're so dog-gonned right. Why, American history is
just one glad, sweet testimonial to the fact that they 're never wrong. They
're not always on the popular side, or the successful; they 're merely right.
Any other human beings would keep on trying to make use of such a
splendid faculty. Years and years ago they did make use of it; but nowadays
it's enough just to know that they have it, and pretty much all to themselves.

"But, as I was saying, I 'm secretly darned glad that Bertie and I belong
to each other, so to speak. Is n't it funny—I'm not a bit loyal to Bertie, but
he 's perfectly loyal to me. He does n't in the least understand me. I don't
think he even likes me, although that disturbing thought probably has n't
occurred to him yet; but there's no getting around the fact that I 'm one of
his relatives, and he accepts me,—accepts me in a way he never will accept
you, no matter how well he gets to know you and like you. There's
something rather fine in that, don't you think? Of course, it might be a good
deal of a bore if he took a fancy to me; but as he won't, it's really a great
comfort. The fact that that plain, but healthy-looking, silent person in the
very badly made dark gray suit accepts me and will always accept me, is
equivalent to an illuminated address of welcome and the freedom of the
city.
"You really can't imagine how it simplifies things," Berri continued.
"It's such a relief, such an absolution! It leaves me, as some one says, 'with
nothing on my mind but my hair and my hat;' and even they don't have to be
brushed as long as people consider me a Stockbridge at heart. Why, if I
didn't feel like it, I shouldn't have to be even polite. Of course I am polite.
But it's a mere habit with me; I dare say I 'll get out of it. You've noticed,
haven't you, how brusque and sort of primitive Bertie's manner is as a rule?
Well, they 're all more or less like that. People who like them say it arises
from shyness and simplicity, and people who don't like them declare that it's
just common or domestic rudeness; but it really is n't one or the other, and I
think I ought to know. The family manner comes from a curious conviction
that politeness, grace, tact—the practice of making oneself agreeable free of
charge, so to speak—has to do with the emotions; which is perfectly absurd.
The habit of politeness is about as emotional as the habit of brushing one's
teeth. But Bertie's tribe does n't think so; and emotion with them is simply

another word for effeminacy. You see, they 're so sure of coming up to the
scratch in the big things that they let the little ones slide. I think they always
vaguely associate politeness with French waiters and Neapolitan cripples.
So, in a way, they 'll rather expect it of you; they like all foreigners to seem
foreign."
Bertie gabbled about no end of things that afternoon. He had what he
calls a "dry jag," and hardly ever stopped talking from the time we left our
house just after luncheon until we came down Brattle Street on the way
back and went into Mrs. Brown's for dinner. Once he and a lot of kids
coming out of a schoolhouse away across the river somewhere, pasted one
another with snowballs (I joined them) until a policeman made us stop, and
for a few minutes the torrent of talk was interrupted. But he made up for it
by yelling every time he hit any one or got hit himself. He told me all sorts
of tales, and I could n't help thinking how different everything was from
Perugia.
It had never occurred to me before that Perugia was so happy-go-lucky
and uncivilized. Why, out there we just seem to grow up like those great
round weeds on the prairie that suddenly let go for no particular reason and
then bound along in the breeze through the wide flat streets until they run
against a fence or a house and, for a while, stick there. It does n't seem to
me that anything much is decided for us in advance. I did n't know even that
I was coming to college until about a year and a half beforehand,—which
made it simply awful, as I had to study everything at once and did n't learn
much of anything. Now, Berri says that, with the exception of himself, who
was "grossly neglected" and never studied anything but French and
German, his entire family for generations has lived by a sort of educational
and social calendar from which they never deviate except in the event of a
civil war. He says he should n't be a bit surprised to learn that there were

certain definite, unalterable dates at which the little boys began and left off
tin soldiers and the breeding of guinea-pigs, and the little girls began and
left off paper-dolls and "dressing up." He declares that, providing the laws
of nature are reasonably consistent, they all know exactly what they 'll be
doing at any period of their lives; that even matrimony has ceased to be a
lottery with them, as they go in for marrying, not individuals, but types.
Isn't it perfectly wonderful?
"Now, take Bertie," he said. "Bertie knew who his classmates in
college were going to be, at the age of five. They 're the same chaps he's
been going to school with, and to the kid dancing-classes, you know, the
Saturday Mornings and Thursday Afternoons or whatever they are, all these
years. They go to the Friday Evenings this year, and next year they 'll go to
the Saturday Evenings, and at all these morns and noons and dewy eves
they dance with the same girls that two years from now they 'll meet in
society and subsequently marry, just because it's part of the routine. After
they get out of college they 'll all go abroad for a few months in groups of
three and four, and when they get back they 'll be taken into the same club
(their names will have been on the waiting list some twenty-odd years), and
they 'll join a lunch club down town in order not to miss seeing one another
every day at noon for the rest of their lives."
Then Berri told me about the girls. Really my heart bleeds for the girls,
because apparently, unless they are terribly pretty or terribly clever or
terribly rich, they must have a devil of a time. Berri says that although they
all "come out," they don't all stay out; that after about a year or so a good
many of them sort of slink in again by unanimous consent. (Imagine such a
thing in Perugia! Why, every girl has a good time there for just as long as
she wants to.) The pretty ones, however, never go in again; because, if you
once get a reputation for beauty here, Berri says it never leaves you (the

reputation, I mean), and that 's why an evening party in Boston often strikes
a stranger as being so largely a matter of physical traditions. At a dance the
rich plain girls, he says, have a good time too, but only for the first part of
the evening. The men speak of them as "pills" (a quaint, chivalrous custom,
is it not?), and try to dance with them as early in the evening as possible,
because everybody else is trying to do the same thing and there isn't so
great a chance of getting stuck for an hour or so. But later on they ask only
the ones they really want to dance with, and the plain rich girl finds herself
spending a cozy eternity with some one who is inwardly moaning because
he delayed until the rush was over.
The girls too are born into a sort of rut, Berri says. It takes the form of
sewing-circles. Berri can discourse for hours at a time on these institutions.
His aunt Josephine has been going to the same one every week for fifty
years. He said that once when he was a little child he heard an Englishman
who had lived in India telling about the mysterious rapidity with which a
piece of news spread among the natives of that country. Within half a day,
this man declared, a rumor would sort of leap through the air from Calcutta
to the most obscure villages on the Afghan frontier, and no one could
explain how it was done. Berri used to fall asleep at night worrying over it.
But now, even in India romance is dead, Berri says; he 's convinced that the
whole thing was nothing but just sewing-circles.
"Why, Granny, if I were to lock myself up in my room in Cambridge
and draw the curtains and stuff the keyhole and then murmur in a low voice
that—well, for instance, that you and Sarah Bernhardt had been quietly
married at the First Baptist Church in Somerville that afternoon, and then
dash in to my aunt Josephine's as fast as a car could take me, she would
greet me in the library with: 'My dear, have you heard! I 've just come from

the sewing-circle, and they say—of course I don't believe it'—and so on.
And this is n't any idle jest, either; it's a fact."
He was just beginning to tell me something else about them—I forget
what—when we both realized that it was rather late, and that if we expected
to get back in time for dinner we should have to find a shorter way or take
the car. We neither of us knew where we were, although Berri said the place
looked as if it might be called "Upper-West-Newtonville-Centre Corners."
So we stopped a little girl who was trudging along with a pitcher of milk in
her hand.
"Little girl, can you tell me where we are?" Berri asked her solemnly.
She stared at us for a moment with great round eyes (Berri admitted
afterwards that the question was a stupid one), and finally answered in a
high, scornful little voice,—
"Main Street."
Berri refused to ask again after that, and we strolled about for a time
until we caught sight of the tower of Memorial,—it suddenly appeared
against the sky in quite the wrong direction,—and then of course getting
home was easy enough.
We were rather confidential on the way back, and talked about the
"Dickey," which we had never discussed before. The Dickey is the great
Sophomore secret society. I don't remember just how the subject came up,
but something reminded Berri of one night earlier in the year,—one of the
nights on which the society takes on ten new members. They choose them
from the Sophomore class always except late in the spring, just before
college closes, when ten—the "First Ten"—are elected from among the
Freshmen. However, by that time the Freshmen are almost Sophomores, so
it amounts to about the same thing. When a ten is taken on, the whole club
marches through the streets at about eleven o'clock at night, singing a song

that has no words but "Tra la la la, la la, la la." It's a wonderful little tune;
it's very short and simple, and after you 've heard it once it sticks in your
head, you can't forget it. Unlike other catchy airs, though, you somehow
don't get tired of it. I 've heard it over and over again since I 've been here,
—on pianos as I passed under the windows of upper classmen, whistled by
muckers in the Yard, and sung by the club at night,—and it always gives me
a thrill; I suppose it 's because it means such a lot, and because you realize
that no one (except the muckers) would play it or sing it or whistle it who
was n't entitled to.
On the night that Berri referred to, the club must have been half a mile
away when we first heard it. Berri was in my room reading, and I was
writing a letter. My back was toward him, and we neither of us said
anything when the vague musical "tra la la las" floated up from away down
by the river somewhere. They were very faint, and after a minute or two
stopped entirely. Then, just as I had forgotten about it, the song began again,
—a little louder and more distinct this time and getting louder every second.
Then it suddenly broke off once more. But I didn't forget it, for I knew that
the club had stopped to take some one out of his room—some one who had
just been elected—and march him along with the others, and I waited kind
of nervously for the refrain to begin again; it never gets started quite evenly,
—only a few voices at first, the rest joining in as the crowd turns away from
the door of the "neophyte's" house and starts along the street. They came
nearer and nearer,—the song grew louder and louder. Some of the fellows
were singing a clear tenor that made the last few notes of every verse die
away in a kind of high, sad wail. It seemed ridiculous for me to be sitting
there pretending to write a letter, with Berri reading in such elaborate
unconsciousness by the fire, when the ears of both of us were strained to
catch every note, and the hoarse, fierce shouts that suddenly broke through

the song as the Dickey turned into our street; but neither of us knew what to
say exactly. At last, however, I could n't stand it any longer, and jumped up
and blew out both the lamps. With the room dark we could stand at the
window and not be seen. Freshmen are n't expected to show any particular
interest in the proceedings of the Dickey; it's considered fresh. They were
just tramping past our house when we leaned out,—a singing, shouting,
irresistible mob,—and Berri and I looked down at them in silence. We were
both excited, and I felt chilly all over—but that may have been on account
of the open window. The crowd did not pass on, as we thought it would, but
stopped at a house across the street a few doors down. Once more the song
ceased; men formed in a double line that reached from the piazza to the
street, and there were hoarse cries of "Pull him out—pull him out!" Then
the front door burst open, and a fellow—he seemed to be half dressed—
came hurtling through the air between the double row waiting for him.
There was a moment of confusion and savage yells, during which it looked
as if the whole crowd was trying to get its hands on him. We lost sight of
him in the shuffle, and in another instant the song began, louder than before,
and the Dickey swayed away into the darkness. We stood at the window
until the clearness and energy of the "Tra la la la, la la, la la," faded to a
thin, dim, uncertain rhythm,—a suggestion of tenor that all but lost itself in
the pearly fog rolling up from the marshes.
I fumbled for a match when we turned at last to the room. But before I
found one, Berri said, "I think I 'll go to bed, Granny," and by the time I got
the lamp lighted he had slipped away. I don't know why exactly, but I was
rather glad he hadn't waited. After that I tried to finish my letter, but I could
n't make myself end the sentence I had been writing the way I had meant to
end it in the first place. So I put the thing in the fire and sat there awhile,
thinking, and then went to bed myself.

XIV

Well, as I said, something reminded Berri of that night, and as we were on a
deserted road far from Cambridge, he referred to it,—indirectly at first, and
afterwards right out in so many words. But he didn't talk in the same free
and airy strain he had been talking in before, and although I wanted to hear
what he said and ask questions and say a few things myself, I had a feeling
all the time that perhaps we ought to change the subject; it made me
uncomfortable. Then I thought of the way I had talked to Duggie the first
evening, away back in September, and positively blushed when I
remembered that I had asked him, outright, how one ought to go about
getting on clubs. Why, that was enough to sewer me with almost anybody in
the world but Duggie. Imagine my doing such a thing now! No one ever
thinks of mentioning the clubs in general conversation. Of course once in a
while some fresh kid who happens to live next door to one of them comes
out with an allusion of some kind, and embarrasses everybody to death; and
I 've had one or two upper classmen—Juniors or Seniors—who hadn't made
the Dickey and didn't belong to a club talk to me quite freely about the
whole matter in a tone that implied that such things were all very well, no
doubt, but did n't interest them particularly. You can get a good deal of
information from upper classmen of this kind,—fellows who are n't on
clubs and have given up expecting to be; they don't think you fresh. But it
would never do to ask for any from a Dickey man; that would be awful.
Why, you 'd never be taken on if you did that.
Even Berri does n't seem to know much about the Dickey, or, if he
does, he did n't tell me anything very definite. He said, though, that if you

didn't make it, you might just as well pack up and go home; that Dickey
men kind of flocked together and did n't go outside much for their friends,
and that the fellows you wanted to know usually were on the Dickey. Then,
too, he said that if a man did n't make the Dickey, he wasn't likely to be
taken into a club. Berri seemed to know a lot about the clubs. I knew hardly
anything at all; in fact, I thought the Dickey was a club, but he says it isn't,
—that it's a society. The clubs, he says, are great. His uncle took him to one
for breakfast once before he—Berri—got into college. (Of course he
couldn't be taken to one now.) He said he did n't notice anything particularly
secret about it; it was just like one of the good clubs in town. I found out the
names of most of them from him—they seem to have Greek names, yet are
called by queer nicknames as a rule—and where they are. This last,
however, I knew pretty well before, but I did n't know which was which,
and could n't ask exactly. I had often seen fellows going in and out of
certain houses along Mount Auburn Street that did n't look like residences
somehow, although they might have been, and wondered just what they
were. At night, even with the shades down, they were always lighted from
top to bottom. No matter how late it was, the lights were there, cheerful and
inviting,—which in itself seemed remarkable when I considered how early
Cambridge (the town, I mean) goes to bed. But one morning when I was
hurrying to a lecture, two fellows came out of Claverly Hall, and one of
them said to the other, "Hold up a minute; I left my note-book at the club,"
and dashed across the street. Then it suddenly dawned on me. Of course I
never look curiously at them any more, but just walk right on with my eyes
fixed on something in the distance as if they were ordinary houses. I can't
help wondering, sometimes, whether anybody ever noticed me staring at
them and at the fellows going in and out—before I knew. I hope not.

When I asked Duggie about getting into clubs that time, I remember he
evaded the subject (which was darned good of him, it seems to me now) by
saying something about being polite to everybody.
"That's all very well," Berri answered, when I laughed a little and told
him about it, "but there's such a thing as being too polite. You see, there are
fellows right now in our class—you know who they are and I do too—who
are, even as early as this, being considered for the First Ten. If you suddenly
turned in and tried to make yourself nice to them, why, everybody would
say you were 'swiping;' and so you would be. The First Ten elects the
Second Ten, you know."
"Duggie did n't mean that you ought to be polite only to the fellows
you think are going to help you along," I answered. "It was exactly the
reverse of that. What he meant was that you ought to be the same to
everybody."
"I wonder if he was," Berri mused. "It's so easy, after you 've once got
to the top yourself, to think you did it all with the help of the Scriptures. It's
like these old vultures who 've stolen everything in sight ever since they
were born, beginning their magazine articles on 'How to Get Rich' with:
'Honesty and Industry must be the motto of him who would attain wealth!'"
I refused to see any connection between Duggie and the old vultures,
and tried to get back to the clubs. However, we did n't say much more about
them, and squabbled most of the way home over the subject of popularity. It
does seem queer that some fellows have so many friends, while others who
start with about the same opportunities and even greater natural advantages
now and then have so few. I suggested that when a fellow was
tremendously popular and "in" everything—and I could n't see why it was
exactly—he probably had very interesting or fascinating qualities that I had
n't perhaps discovered. Berri, however, maintained that popularity was often

nothing but an idiotic fashion, and mentioned several popular fellows he did
n't like, to prove it.
"Now look at Tucker Ludlow," he burst out. "What is he? A dissipated
little beast; you know he is, everybody knows he is. Not that I should mind
his being dissipated and a beast, if he were ever anything else; but he isn't.
He's stupid, and he 's ignorant, and he is n't even good-looking, yet he
moves in a crowd,—a nice crowd too; and when he moves, the crowd
moves with him. That's nothing but fashion. It is n't possible that anybody
can really like the creature. But it amounts to the same thing; I 've already
heard it kind of whispered around that he 'll be on the First Ten."
What Berri said interested me very much, for Ludlow and I had
agreed, a few days before, to grind together on a course for the mid-year
exams. I had intended to remind him of it, but now that Berri said he was
spoken of for the First Ten I don't like to; people might think I was swiping.
I don't care much for Ludlow myself; but he doesn't irritate me the way he
does Berri, and I do think there must be something to him.
After the freaks of fashion, Berri seemed to think that the most popular
men—in one's Freshman year anyhow—were the fellows whose
opportunities for making friends were good to begin with, and who were n't
in any way particularly startling,—athletics, of course, always excepted;
athletes never lack a following. But it does n't do, he says, to be different, or
to excel at first in much of anything else. You may with perfect safety have
the reputation for knowing things or being clever, but that 's very different
from really knowing or being. The man who actually knows or is, is
doomed.
"What about Reggie Howard, then?" I asked. Everybody likes Howard,
and yet he knows a fearful amount and is as clever as any one could be. I
knew Berri thought so, and wondered how he would get out of it.

"Yes, Reggie's wise,—very wise," he admitted, "but with the exception
of you and me, almost no one suspects it. He does n't object to my knowing,
because he feels sure I don't mind; and you 're safe because you 're so kind.
But he takes care that people generally don't get on to it. That's part of his
wisdom."
One thing I 've learned here that surprised me a good deal, and that is
—popularity has nothing to do with money. I always had an idea that
people with money to throw to the birds could n't help being liked; but that
evidently is n't the case. And Berri did n't have to tell me; I found it out for
myself. Of course it's nice to be able to live in comfortable rooms and have
plenty to eat and wear decent clothes. No one objects to that, and no one
objects, apparently, to a fellow's doing more than that,—to spending,
indeed, a good deal of money if he has it to spend. But the mere fact of a
man's having a record-breaking allowance does n't seem to interest people
in the least, and if some frightfully rich fellow comes to college with a
flourish of trumpets in the Sunday papers about his father's income, and
how many horses he intends to keep, and how much the furnishing of his
rooms will probably cost, it 's decidedly against him. I was thinking, I
suppose, of Tony Earle in our class. His father makes millions and millions
out of safety-matches—I believe it is. Anyhow, everybody speaks of Tony
as "His Matchesty," and has very little to do with him. The fellows are
simply prejudiced against him because the papers said he had so much
money. And he 's really a perfectly harmless, rather quiet sort of person who
plays well on the piano. Berri and I spent an evening with him once. We
were dining in town, and Earle was all alone across the room. He looked so
dreary that Berri finally exclaimed,—
"For heaven's sake, why doesn't some one take pity on that poor
wretched millionaire? It's positively pathetic!"

I suggested asking him to come over and have his dinner with us. But
Berri, like every one else, objected.
"He 'd probably order nightingales or peacocks or some such thing,
and then insist on paying for us," he said.
"Well, let's ask him and see," I urged. "We'll make that the test. If he
tries to pay the whole bill, he won't do." So Berri went over and asked him
to join us, and he turned out just as I said,—quiet and not especially
interesting, but a good deal nicer than a lot of fellows who won't know him.
When it came to paying the waiter, Berri kicked me under the table and
spent an indecently long time in looking over the check. I think he was
actually disappointed when Earle glanced across the table and merely said,
—
"By the way, what's my share?"
When we got to Cambridge he asked us over to his rooms. They
certainly are dreams; even Berri could n't find anything wrong with them.
He bangs the box like a wizard.
"I was afraid he was going to say he was lonely, or something
melodramatic like that, when we got up to leave and he asked us to come
again," Berri remarked on the way home. "Of course he is horribly lonely,
and it was very considerate of him not to spoil everything by saying so. I
think we 'll have to go back. To-morrow at luncheon we can start a society
for the prevention of cruelty to millionaires."
Well, if I 'm ever ostracized it won't be because people are scared at
my allowance. Papa and I have been having an exceedingly brisk
correspondence lately. Just after the family got back to Perugia, Mildred
wrote me that papa had won an important lawsuit and was going to get an
unusually large fee. So I bought some clothes and a few things I really
needed on the strength of it and had the bill sent home, as he made me

promise to let him know just what I spent. He replied at some length,
declaring, among other things, that I reminded him of what Charles Lamb
says of a poor relation; Lamb's remark being, "A poor relation is a
preposterous shadow lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity." I
expostulated, and told him about Willie Jackson. Willie's elder brother
passed through Boston not long ago, and when Willie went in to see him he
asked for money with which to buy a dress-suit case and some shoes he
needed badly. No one knows exactly how it happened,—some think that
Willie had been brooding over the Fine Arts course he is taking and the
instructor's plea for more beauty in one's every-day environment. Anyhow,
when Willie stepped off the car in Cambridge, he had—not the shoes and
the dress-suit case, but a palm and a canary-bird.
To this papa replied that he didn't see why I had taken the trouble to
record for his benefit the exploits of Willie Jackson, as he never for a
moment had doubted that there were as many fools in college as elsewhere.
That is where the matter rests at present.
As there is nothing doing now that you can watch in the afternoon as
you can the football practice in the autumn and the baseball and crews in
the spring, some of us at the table have become athletes on our own
account. We go to the gym every day at about five, and work with chest-
weights and dumbbells, and are put through all sorts of agonizing
performances in a large class of hard students who never take any other
kind of exercise. Then we run up North Avenue as far as the railway-station
and back to our rooms. I don't know how far it is, but the return trip at first
seemed to be about a hundred miles; it's a little shorter now, and gets shorter
every day. After a hot shower-bath and then a cold one you feel eight or ten
feet high, and walk through the Square to dinner, sticking out your chest.
It's queer you don't catch cold, running in the icy wind with literally nothing

on but a pair of tennis shoes, loose short cotton drawers, and a thin
sleeveless undershirt; but you never seem to. The gym made me stiff all
over for a day or two, but I feel fine now, and wonder why we never
thought of it before. The muckers on the Avenue bother us a good deal with
snowballs when we run. Hemington very foolishly chased one of them not
long ago and washed his face with snow. The paternal mucker has since
sued Hemi for assault and battery. Hemi is in a great state about it, and we
are all looking forward to cutting a morningful of lectures and testifying in
court.
The mid-years are almost here, and I feel as if it were only about the
day before yesterday that I was failing in the hour exams. I simply must do
well in the mid-years, for if I don't they will probably change my probation
to "special probation" (as it is called), which is the limit, my adviser says, of
everything obnoxious. I should have to report—to him most likely—every
morning at half-past eight, just to show that I was up bright and early and
"in sympathy with the work," so to speak. Then at ten or eleven in the
evening I should have to drop in again, which of course would make it
impossible to go to the theatre without permission. An extra-sharp lookout
would be kept on my work, and altogether special probation is easily a
consummation devoutly to be avoided. I suppose I 'll have to grind and
grind night and day in order to get everything down cold. I wish now that I
had kept on studying an hour or two every day, as I did for about a week
after my encounter with the exams in October. I should n't be well prepared
even then, but it would n't all seem so perfectly hopeless as it does now. It's
so hard, though, to do anything regularly when the front door is unlocked
most of the time, as ours is. And there 's no use in locking the door of my
room, as the fellows don't knock once and go away, but pound and rattle
and shout insulting remarks through the keyhole. All of which makes me

feel disagreeable and rather affected,—locking myself up when other
people get along so well without that sort of thing. I have n't done it more
than once or twice.
Anyhow I 'll probably get a good mark in my English Composition.
The instructor seems to like my themes and reads a good many of them in
class. Lately, however, he has developed the unnecessary trick of
pronouncing the words, when he is reading, exactly as they are spelled,
which is extremely trying for me and not fair to the theme. It has made
several really good ones sound ridiculous. Spelling is n't my strong point, I
know; but I draw the line at Berri's guying me about it,—Berri, whose
spelling, unless he digs every other word out of the dictionary, looks like
some kind of absurd French dialect. He has recently taken to getting off a
rigmarole (it's supposed to be about me) that begins something like this,—
"'Berri, how do you spell "parallel"?'
"'Why, p-a-r-a-l-l-e-l, of course.'
"'Thank you; that's the way I have it.' (Then nothing was heard but the
scratching of a penknife.)"
I think they 're rather fussy about details here. On the back of my last
theme the instructor wrote: "By the way, dotting one's i's and crossing one's
t's are charming literary habits when once acquired."
However, I think I shall get a good mark in this course,
notwithstanding. But life isn't all English Composition, and I have a terrible
amount of work to do in the other things. Berri and I began, in a way, to
prepare for the ordeal by going to the theatre for the last time until the mid-
year period is at an end. We made an occasion of it, and ended by doing
something that I had never dreamed we were going to do when we started
out. It was foolish, I suppose, and I don't know exactly what mamma would
think about it. I should like to tell her and find out, but I 'm afraid papa

might get hold of it, and my idea of his opinion on the subject is somewhat
less vague. What we did was to invite one of the girls in the show to supper.
Berri proposed it. We were sitting in the front row away to one side,
and when the second act was about half over, he exclaimed to me,—
"There, she 's done it again; that's the third time." I asked him what he
meant, and he replied that one of the girls on our side of the stage had
winked at us. The attention, he explained, must have been meant for us.
And for a variety of reasons it did n't seem as if it could have been intended
for any one else. In the first place our seats were the last in the row. Behind
us were some ladies, and on the other side of Berri was a very old man who
sat half turned away from the stage, holding a great black tin trumpet to his
ear, as if he were expecting the actors to lean over the footlights and pour
something into it.
"I don't want to appear vain," Berri went on, "but as a mere matter of
geographical position I think that we 're It." The comedian was singing a
song in the middle of the stage, and on either side of him was a row of girls
—convent girls they were supposed to be—who joined in the chorus at the
end of every verse and shook their fingers at him reprovingly. They were all
dressed in tights. This was n't the convent uniform (they had appeared in
that during the first act), and was explained by the fact that they had been
rehearsing for private theatricals when the comedian fell in through the
window. The comedian was a burglar, and his tights were merely a clever
disguise. He was making the girls believe that he was a professional actor
hired by the mother superior to teach them how to sing and dance. This was
the plot, and it was really rather complicated, for when they all decided to
leave the convent with the burglar and spend the evening at a roof-garden,
they rushed in dressed as policemen, pretending that they had come to arrest
the burglar. The mother superior did n't recognize them, of course, and was

naturally glad to have the burglar taken away. Then, at the roof-garden—in
the third act—they appeared as waiters; all of which made it hard for me to
keep track of them very well. But Berri could spot our girl every time, and
by carefully examining the program and comparing the names of the chorus
with the various changes of costume she went through, he managed in some
way, by the end of the second act, to discover her name. It was Miss Mae
Ysobelle. To tell the truth, I did n't think her particularly pretty. She was tall
and not a bit graceful, and when she danced she looked as if it were hard
work to move her arms and legs the right number of times and finish with
the others. She smiled a great deal, but the moment she stopped dancing her
mouth sort of snapped back to place as if it were made of stiff red rubber. I
found, after watching her for a long time, that my own mouth got very tired.
I told Berri this; also that her clothes looked as if they had been made for
some one else. But Berri somehow seemed to think she might be unusually
agreeable if one knew her.
"Very often, you know, really pretty people don't make up well at all;
and as for her clothes looking as if they did n't belong to her, why, she can't
help that, poor thing! they probably don't. She is a little knock-kneed, but
you would n't notice that if she had a skirt on."
"Well, there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of our seeing her
with a skirt," I answered, for some of the convent girls—Mae Ysobelle
among them—had suddenly changed their minds about being waiters and
had decided to give the interrupted private theatricals right there on the
roof-garden stage. They came prancing in dressed as jockeys, while the man
in the orchestra who, as Berri says, supplies music with local color, slapped
two thin boards together to imitate the crack of a whip.
"Oh, I don't know," Berri mused; "we might manage to meet her after
the show,—ask her to supper or something. She seems friendly enough," he

added; for, as he was speaking, the jockeys drew up at the edge of the stage,
touched their caps, then leaned over, and all winked. Miss Ysobelle was
unmistakably looking at us as she did it.
I did n't believe she would go with us even if we asked her, but Berri
said we 'd rush out after the third act and buy her some flowers and send an
usher behind the scenes with them. We ended by doing this—we got her a
big box of roses—and writing a note asking her to meet us at the stage door
when the performance was ended. Berri signed it "Front row—extreme
left."
We did n't get an answer to it, at least not in words; but when the
curtain went up again on a scene in the convent garden, Miss Ysobelle had
one of our roses in her hair and another at her belt, and I began to feel
excited at the prospect of meeting her. In fact, the whole last act had a
personal interest for us that the others had not. It was almost like being on
the stage and enjoying everything from the inside. I even felt rather sorry
for the rest of the audience who were sitting there perfectly oblivious to the
intrigue going on in the blaze of the footlights, before their unsuspecting
eyes. One thing struck us both as rather odd at first. Miss Ysobelle, except
for the roses, scrupulously ignored us through the entire act. She not only
never winked at us, she never even looked at us. In fact, she gave us both
the impression that she had become absorbed in something at the other side
of the house. I could n't understand this, and neither could Berri, although
he said there was probably some theatrical etiquette connected with her
averted gaze, or perhaps the stage-manager had told her to be more
dignified. We decided to ask her about it at supper. Well, we never got a
chance to ask her, but we found out soon enough for ourselves.
As we had the last seats on the left side of the front row, we were
naturally the last to get into the middle aisle on the way out, or, rather, we

and the people who had the corresponding seats on the other side of the
house were the last. We met them when we reached the end of our row, and
had to stop a moment as they stood there putting on their overcoats and
blocking the way. One of them I noticed particularly,—a great, big thug of a
creature who had shiny black hair slicked up in front with a barbery
flourish, and a very fancy waistcoat and cravat. They kept just ahead of us
on the way out, and laughed a good deal. Berri and I were unusually silent.
We did n't go quite to the stage door, as the electric light fizzing right
over it made everything in the little alley as bright as day. Neither of us was
very keen to join the group loitering near by, so we stood a little back in the
shadow and waited. Finally some men with their collars turned up came
out; then two women with thick veils on. They seemed to be in a great
hurry, and for a few seconds we were afraid that one of them might be Miss
Ysobelle; but we remembered how tall she was and did n't run after them.
Then more men came, and more girls,—some of whom were joined by men
waiting at the door. It seemed at last as if the whole company must have
come out, and Berri and I were beginning to think that Miss Mae Ysobelle
must have left before we arrived, when the door opened once more and she
appeared with our box of flowers in her arms. For a moment she stood on
the step and looked around expectantly.
"I think we ought to go up," Berri murmured nervously; but I thought
it would be better to wait and join her as she passed by.
Then a queer thing happened. Just as she decided to leave the step,
who should go up to her but the big thug with the shiny hair and loud
waistcoat? He lifted his hat and shook hands with her very cordially, then
took the box of flowers—our flowers—and strolled away with her out of
the alley to the street. As they passed by, we heard her exclaim, "Say, it was

awful nice of you to send those Jacques. When Myrtle seen me open the
box—" The rest of the sentence was lost in the rattle of a cab.
Berri and I waited a moment before coming out of the shadow. Then
we looked at each other, and Berri shrieked with laughter. We laughed all
the way back to Cambridge. The people in the car must have thought—I
don't know what they could have thought. For a long time we could n't
imagine why things had turned out as they had until Berri remembered that
he had signed the note "Front row—extreme left." He had meant our left,
but Miss Ysobelle no doubt thought that it referred to her left,—which was
quite another matter.

XV

I've been dead to the world for more than a month; it seems about a year.
Yet when I came to look at the situation squarely, there wasn't anything else
to do exactly. It was a case of getting the drop on my exams or letting them
get the drop on me. Of course, I could have sort of fooled with them and
thought I was learning something about them and then perhaps have
scraped through in one or two and failed in the others. And this, as a matter
of fact, was the way in which Tucker Ludlow and I did go at them at first.
Tucker came up to my room two or three times, armed with some type-
written notes on Greek architecture that he had bought at one of the book
stores in the Square. The first time he came was rather late in the afternoon.
He examined everything in my room, and we talked a good deal; he had
been out West once, and seemed to know much more about that part of the
country than I did. However, we finally got to work and had read about two

pages of the notes when Hemington came in. He saw that we were grinding,
and said he would n't sit down and interrupt us, especially as he ought to be
in his own room, grinding himself. He did n't actually sit down, but leaned
against the mantelpiece and smoked for a while, and then compromised by
half sitting on the arm of a chair in a temporary way and swinging his leg.
When at last he got up to leave, it was so near dinner that Ludlow went with
him, and said he would continue some other time. He left the notes with me,
and at first I thought I should study them alone, but as Ludlow and I had
agreed to grind the course up together, there did n't seem to be any point in
getting ahead of him; so in a few minutes I went to dinner myself.
The next time Ludlow came to study was in the evening. He proposed
that I should read the notes aloud, as he found the architectural terms so
hard to pronounce; we were to stop and talk over anything we did n't
understand. I made myself comfortable in a chair near the lamp, and
Ludlow drew up to the fire. After droning along for about ten minutes about
triglyphs and epistyles and entablatures and all that sort of thing, I suddenly
had a jealous feeling that he was getting more good from the performance
than I was, for he had n't asked a question, while I had n't understood a
single sentence. Finally, without looking up, I said,—
"Tucker, if you really know what 'pseudo-peripteral' means, I wish you
would tell me." Tucker didn't answer, and I thought he was probably trying
to get at a definition simple enough for me to grasp. But when I glanced
over toward the fireplace, I saw that he was asleep with his mouth open.
Well, I felt rather angry at first,—it all seemed such a waste of time; but it
struck me, too, as being funny, so I did n't wake him. He must have slept for
at least ten minutes longer (of course I did n't bother about reading aloud
any more), and then he came to, exclaiming,—

"Read that about the ground plan once more; I don't think I quite got
that." As the ground plan was almost the first topic mentioned, I suppose he
had dozed off almost immediately. After that I made him do the reading, but
he had n't stumbled through many pages before he put down the notes and
said,—
"Granny, don't you think that if we tackled this beastly drivel in the
daytime, our heads would be clearer?"
That was the end of our grinding together. He came to my room once
more, but I was out. It was after this experience that I thought the matter
over and decided I should have to do the thing differently, and for the most
part alone. My most brilliant stroke was getting the key of Duggie's room
from Mrs. Chester; I could lock myself up there and be perfectly safe.
When fellows saw my own door wide open and no one at home, they went
away at once without making a row. Of course I had to let Berri into the
game; but as he began to be scared about some of his own exams, he was
grateful for the refuge and did n't give it away.
I went to work at the whole business scientifically, determined not to
leave a single thing, however unimportant, to chance. And I 'm convinced
now that if I have the nerve always to do this, I can get through any
examination I 'm ever likely to have,—not brilliantly, perhaps, but very
respectably. First of all, I spent a day in the library and got hold of a lot of
books that gave my various courses in their simplest, clearest form. For the
Fine Arts course I found that a copy of the notes that Ludlow had was better
than anything. They stated facts in a condensed way that made it possible to
keep in your head a bird's-eye view of the entire course, as far as we had
gone. Then I made a list of the number of pages of general reading we had
to accomplish in every course, and split them up so as to be able to get
through them all—taking notes as I read—by reading a certain number of

pages a day. I left a margin at the end for review and in case of accidents.
And finally, after I had made these preparations and collected as many of
the necessary books as I could (I had to do some of my reading in the
library), I locked Duggie's door one morning after breakfast, and sat down
at his desk, and stayed there until luncheon; and after luncheon I went back
and stayed until it was time to go to the gym and take a run; and after dinner
I went back and stayed until bedtime. And I did this every day with very
few interruptions until I could pick up any of the text-books, turn to the
alphabetical index, and plough right through it, describing in detail every
darned thing it mentioned; and an alphabetical index mentions a good deal.
If I slipped up on anything, I would mark it with a pencil, go back and learn
it. Oh, it was perfectly awful! I got so tired and discouraged and maudlin at
times that I would have to lean back and close my eyes and let my bursting
mind become a throbbing blank for a few minutes, in order to keep from
screaming. But after the gym and the run and the shower-bath, I felt all right
again,—just as if nothing had happened.
Two courses—the physics and philosophy—I had to tutor in for a
while. There was no use pegging away at them by myself, for I simply did
n't understand some of the experiments, and logic I could n't make head or
tail of. A Senior who lived in College House explained them to me in
simple golden words (three dollars an hour were his terms), and when I
once saw through it all and had it down on paper in my own language, I
could let it soak in at home. The other things—the ones I did understand,
like History and Fine Arts—were merely a matter of incessant repetition
and memory.
The night before the Fine Arts exam I went to what is called a
"Seminar" in that subject. I could have got along very well without it after
my days and days of slavery, but about every one I knew was going, and I

wanted to see what it was like. There are several men here who make a
business of boiling popular courses down to their most painlessly
swallowable dimensions, and then giving the thing the evening before the
examination in a kind of lecture, for which they charge an admittance fee of
three or four dollars. This performance is a seminar,—a kind of royal road,
if not to learning at least to passing examinations. They say that fellows
who never look at a book or take a note in class often go to a seminar and,
providing they have good memories, are able to answer enough questions
on the exam paper the next morning to get through with colors flying. A
certain number of questions on almost every paper simply have to deal with
cold, isolated facts rather than with the generalities, comparisons, and
discussions that necessitate a real knowledge of the subject, and it is with
these facts—pounded in at a seminar—that one puts up a successful bluff.
The authorities naturally object to all this. As Berri remarked about the
seminar we went to,—
"After a professor has earnestly expounded a subject for half a year, it
must make him rather sore to have a cheeky parrot get up and do the whole
thing much better in four hours."
The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a
kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-
past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time,—all the sports of
the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few
Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and
fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of
fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in
appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." As every
man came in, he was given a large sheet of stiff paper on which was printed
a synopsis of the course, with all the subjects that had been touched on

methodically arranged, and a list of definitions, simple and easily
remembered, but adequate. It was Greek art in a nutshell,—a perfect marvel
of clearness and condensation. The little folding chairs had been neatly
arranged in a semicircle at first, but by the time the fellows had taken
possession of them, they looked as if they had been thrown in at random. A
good many men who were evidently old hands at the business arranged
themselves comfortably in two chairs, leaning back in one with their legs
stretched across another, as if prepared to spend the night. A lot of them
took off their coats and waistcoats—the crowd and the gas made the already
overheated room unbearably warm—and I 've never seen so many pretty
shirts in my life as I did that evening.
After every one was settled, the man who was giving the seminar took
a chair on a little platform in front of us, and began—not to talk exactly, but
to drone. He had a harsh monotonous voice—une voix trainante, Berri
called it—and spoke with painful slowness, as if trying not to emphasize
any one topic to the exclusion of the others,—which had the effect of
making his entire discourse, from beginning to end, horribly important.
Except for this crawling sound, the room was absolutely silent; for once
nobody seemed conscious of himself or of any one else. Even when the
man on the platform pronounced Greek words in a novel fashion that was
all his own, there was n't a smile. I don't think we realized the intense strain
of attention we were undergoing until, at the end of an hour and three
quarters, Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to sleep, fell off his chair. The
second or two of relaxation that followed the crash was exquisite. We
stretched our arms and swabbed our foreheads with our handkerchiefs, and
then sank back again for another hour and fifteen minutes, until the bell in
the tower of Memorial boomed out ten o'clock. This seemed to be the signal

for a short vacation; for the fact-machine on the platform finished the
sentence he had begun and then stood up.
There was a general shuffling of chairs and a babbling of voices, and
the crowd divided into chattering groups. Some of the fellows did n't seem
to know anybody, and they either went out and strolled up and down the
corridor or sat studying the synopsis. The host of the evening had provided
beer and ginger ale and cheese and crackers with which to sustain life until
the ordeal was over. He could well afford it, as there were at least seventy-
five men in the room, every one of whom would deposit three dollars and a
half before he left.
While Berri and I and most of our table were talking in a corner, a
fellow named Smith, a Sophomore, sauntered over to us. Berri and I were
the only ones who knew him, so of course he must have come just to speak
to us. I don't remember what he said exactly, as the conversation of the
others sort of faded away when he approached, and Berri and I were
fearfully rattled. He 's very prominent and belongs to everything. After we
had stood there for a minute or two, Hemington and Bertie Stockbridge and
the others drifted off, leaving us three together, and in a moment more Berri
said, "I 'm going over to get another cracker," and also left us. I happened to
notice that he did n't go near the crackers, and furthermore he never came
back. This seemed so queer and unlike Berri that I spoke to him about it on
the way home and asked him why he had done it. He answered by saying,
—
"You don't have to be much of a fox to know when you 're wanted and
when you 're not; and that happened to be one of the times when I wasn't."
This struck me as absurd, and does still. Berri knew Smith every bit as well
as I did, for the only other time he had ever spoken to us we happened to be

together just as we were the night of the seminar. I reminded Berri of this;
but he only laughed a little and replied,—
"Well, as Fleetwood says, 'I 'm an old man and I know my place.'"
Since then Smith has joined me twice when I was walking through the Yard
and seemed very friendly in a distant kind of way. I mean that his joining
me at all was friendly; he is n't much of a talker, and I never know quite
what to say to him. Of course it's very nice in him to do it, but it makes me
rather uncomfortable; for both times we stopped a moment on the steps of
Sever—the bell had n't rung yet—and although there were a lot of fellows I
knew waiting to go in, they merely nodded to me and then looked away.
But I 'm forgetting about the seminar. We went back to our chairs
again, and once more tuned our ears to the monotonous voice of the
lecturer, that dragged on and on till midnight. It became harder and harder
to take in everything he said. The air was heavy with the smoke of Egyptian
cigarettes, and I counted nine men who were sound asleep. I suppose that,
even though asleep, they were more likely to acquire a fact or two than if
they hadn't been there at all. Just at the end—I can hear him now—the man
on the platform leaned back wearily with closed eyes and chanted in the
same hopeless tone,—
"Let me once more urge upon you the importance of expressing in
your examination papers sympathy with the Greek life, the Greek art, and
the Greek ideals of the best period. A page or two of sincere regret that we
moderns do not possess the innate sense of beauty, the joy of life, civic
pride, harmony, and all the other things that the Greeks went in for will help
you to get a passing mark. Remember what I told you about [Greek:
sophrosúne]. Refer to [Greek: sophrosúne] constantly. John Addington
Symonds calls it 'that truly Greek virtue; the correlative in morals to the
passion for beauty.' S-y-m-o-n-d-s, and there are two ds in Addington. If

you get stuck, make use of the quotation I gave you from Goethe—G-o-e-t-
h-e—it comes in well almost anywhere. Good-night and good luck." He
stood at the door as we passed out, holding a box in his hand, into which
every one dropped three Plunks and a half. I was tired when we got home
and went right to bed. But Berri sat up almost until morning, studying the
synopsis and going over his notes.
It must have been some time before this that Berri's thesis arrived from
England one morning with a long letter from Duggie. I have kept a sort of
lookout for it right along, but that morning Berri saw the postman from my
window and ran downstairs to meet him. As he was coming up, he
exclaimed in a surprised voice, "What on earth do you suppose—" and then
broke off abruptly. He passed quickly through my room, dropping a bill on
my desk as he went, and after that the house for about half an hour was very
silent. I had so often wondered what Berri would do, what he would say,
how he would take Duggie's letter when it came, that I instinctively knew it
had at last arrived, and asked no questions.
He surprised me by neither saying nor doing anything; and for two
days I had no reason to suppose that the thesis had wandered back to
Cambridge at all beyond the feeling in my bones that it had. On the third
day, however, Berri, who was just starting off to spend Sunday at his aunt's,
stopped in my room with a letter in his hand. He looked at it doubtfully for
a moment, as if making up his mind about something, and then tossed it
into my lap.
"I got that from Sherwin the other day," he said; and then added, as he
made for the door and I drew the letter from its envelope,—
"Well, it may be all for the best."
I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was
for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I.

There really is n't anything to say.
I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about,
but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little
better than they actually had to be,—which is a comfort in a way. For my
adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to
petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such
things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of
course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me
rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all
his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his
Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't
young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri
extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and
exclaiming à propos of nothing,—
"You can't fool me—you can't fool me!"
My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He
invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to
get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us
better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask
us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my
dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because
I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them.
Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays
himself out to be just as nice as possible,—he succeeds. Yet the fellows
don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They
want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff
at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but
when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only

about the things he thinks you like to talk about—even if you do like to talk
about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it
means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his
room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the
better swipe,—to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the
other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the
decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up
enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as
he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it
always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's
room—if they know one another well enough—and talk the thing over.
Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when
nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for
the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it
was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now,
however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always
manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the
walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the
town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones
that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain
and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they
turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture
from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old
town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered
uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me
to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of
a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks,—three boards
wide, running lengthwise,—but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of

them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you
considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.
The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and
begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft
yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on
the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this
not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm
spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the
fellows practise starting and short sprints.
Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.

XVI

I notice that when I last wrote in my diary I was wishing for spring, and
here it is almost the end of June! Where did all those slow days I
complained of go to so quickly, I wonder? How did I spend them, and why
haven't I tried to tell about them? I don't know unless it was because they
were so slow and did go so quickly. Nothing ever happened, really, until
just at the end; but to-day with Cambridge sizzling hot (I can smell the
asphalt on the main street even here in my room) and perfectly deserted,
except for its inhabitants (who don't count) and the kids who have come to
take their entrance exams, the last three months and a half seem like a
dream. The spring is scarcely over, and yet I 've already begun to look
forward to it again next year.
I liked it so much, I suppose, because in Perugia we don't, as a rule,
have any. Out there it's very much like what you read about Russia: for a

long time it's winter, and then you wake up some morning feeling as if you
had spent the night in a Turkish bath, and know that it is summer; you know
that the soda-fountains are hissing, that a watering-cart is jolting past,
leaving behind it a damp, earthy sensation (something between an odor and
a faint breeze), that an Italian is leaning over the fence languidly calling out,
"Bananos—bananos," that a scissors-grinder is ding-donging in the
distance, and that, of course, a lawn-mower is whirring sharply back and
forth under your windows.
Here warm weather comes slowly and shyly, as if it could n't quite
make up its mind to come at all. There are many days that from the other
side of a pane of glass look all blue and white and gold, and tempt you to
snatch up a cap and run out. You do this, and stand undecidedly on the
sidewalk for a moment; then you go in again and put on your overcoat and
gloves.
Somehow the leaves don't seem to burst out all at once, as they do with
us. You notice first, on Brattle Street and in the Yard, that the trees have
undergone a change. That is, you think they have; the change is so slight
you aren't sure, and may have only imagined it, after all. But in a few days
—I can't now remember how many—you know that you were right; the
branches and twigs that have stood out so hard and definite against all the
winter sunsets have blurred a little,—they are no longer altogether in focus.
They blur more and more as the days go by, until—shall I ever forget it?—
you cease to think of them as trees, and only know that over and beyond
you there is a faint, uncertain mist of tenderest green,—so faint, so
uncertain that you almost glance up to see whether it has drifted away on a
slow, pungent gust from the marshes. But instead of doing that, it grows
denser and greener against the rain-washed blue, until it is no longer a mist,
but a cloud. Then at last there is a delicious crinkling, and the leaves have

come. In May and June bleak, shabby Cambridge covers all its angles and
corners. They are softened and filled with billows and jets and sprays and
garlands,—green, gold, silver, mauve, and—what is the color of apple
blossoms? They are such a tremor of white and pink that I never really
know. The wind loses its bite, and then its chill. The air is moist and warm,
and as you walk slowly through the quiet leafy streets at night, the damp,
fresh lilacs stretch out to dabble against your face, and something—it may
be the stillness and sweetness of it all, or it may be just the penetrating
smell of the box hedges—something makes you very sad and very happy at
the same time.
During the day, between lectures, we loafed a good deal,—on Brattle
Street chiefly; and often in the afternoon, when we were beginning to think
of thinking of grinding for the finals, Berri and I and occasionally
Hemington used to take a book or some notes and go up to the vacant lot
across the street from the Longfellow house. At the further end of this open
space—a meadow during the poet's lifetime, but now, unfortunately, a
rather ugly little park—there is a stone terrace with a short flight of steps
and two broad stone seats against the wall below. Passionate pilgrims come
there for a moment, once in a while, but as a rule it is deserted. We
pretended to study here; but dates and formulas and Geschmitzenmenger's
reflections on the building materials of ancient Rome always got mixed up
in Hemington's tobacco smoke, or we forgot about them in watching the sun
sparkle on the pools left by the falling tide. Berri said that even Italy had
very little more to offer one than a stone bench soaked in sunlight and the
delusion that one was accomplishing something. Now and then we strolled
in Longfellow's garden. The family were out of town, and Berri inherits the
privilege of doing this from his aunt.

I can't get away from the idea that although the days were getting
longer and slower as Class Day drew near, they went ever so much more
quickly than they had at first; notwithstanding, also, the fact that I got up
earlier. I happened to do this the first time by accident. Bertie Stockbridge
was the only person at breakfast, and when I asked him not to leave me
alone, he said he had to or he would be late for Chapel. I had n't known
before that he went to Chapel, but he told me he never missed a morning. I
had n't been there myself at all, but that morning I went with him. It was
very nice. The President was there, and the Dean, and several of the
professors, and a good many students—some of whom I would n't have
suspected of even knowing where the Chapel was. The music was fine; the
little boys in the choir sang like angels,—the same little boys who used to
paste us with snowballs during the winter. After that I went to Chapel
almost every morning until college closed. It was a good way to begin the
day, somehow. Berri began to go too after a while, but he said he did it to
give him luck in his exams.
On Saturday afternoons and Sundays we bicycled a great deal when
the roads began to get into shape. The whole table would start off and
explore the park system, and once we made a historical tour of Lexington
and Concord, which Berri wrote up for the Lampoon. I think Berri will
make the Lampoon next year if he keeps on. His way of going about it is
killing. He writes things, and then comes into my room with a solemn,
anxious face, and says,—
"Do you think this is funny? Glance through it carelessly and tell me
just how it strikes you. I think it's perfectly side-splitting myself,—I do
really; but it mightn't strike anybody else that way."
Then there was Riverside, where the Charles all but loses itself
between steep, cool, shady banks, under trees that peer over the edges all

through the long, drowsy summer, or flows brimming across a meadow
where a man ploughs a rich black border and talks to his horses and sings. It
takes just the amount of effort you like to make, to follow in a canoe the
course of this lazy stream. Riverside is another place to which you like to
take all the essentials for study except the power of will.
As the board decided to let me off probation late in the spring, I could
cut lectures once more without anything very terrible happening, and it was
great on a warm morning to walk into town for luncheon and keep our hats
off while we were on the bridge. There 's almost always a sea-breeze on the
bridge.
I hardly know how to write of the surprising and wonderful thing that
happened to me at the end of May. It came so unexpectedly that even now I
sometimes stop to wonder if it ever happened at all, and if I can be really I.
But when I think it all over carefully, remembering a few of the situations
that led up to it,—trifling incidents that were inexplicable at the time and
worried me very much,—I see now that I wasn't very intelligent in not
suspecting a little what they meant. I never did, though, not in the least.
The thing that happened—how little the simple statement would mean
to papa, for instance, and how much it really does mean!—the thing that
happened was, that I made the First Ten of the Dickey.
As long ago as April, the First Ten began to be—well, it began to be
very much on people's minds, although, of course, hardly anything was said
about it. Berri and I used to talk about it a little; Hemington and I
mentioned it once in a while; I suppose there are about four men in our
class that I knew well enough to discuss it with. But naturally we spoke of it
only when we were absolutely alone. If any one else came into the room,
we began to talk about something else. Yet, although the subject could n't
come up in general conversation, I often knew that it was there—in

everybody's thoughts—in the atmosphere. Every day some little thing
would happen that almost made you jump, as it suddenly brought the
question into your mind, "Who is going to make the First Ten?" things, for
instance, like seeing some one in our class walking through the Square with
a Dickey man who was in the Sophomore class. That always looked as if it
meant something, because—well, because it very often did mean
something. One night Berri told me (in the strictest confidence, of course)
that Phil Blackwood—an upper classman—had met a girl cousin of his in
town at a tea, and had said to her that he liked Berri, and thought he was
great fun to talk to. She had told this to Berri's aunt, who had repeated the
remark to Berri, who was in a great state about it, and wondered how much
importance he ought to attach to it. It really did sound to me as if something
might come of it.
We made lists of names and bet on them, and then locked them up in
our desks. I put Berri's name on my list; but whether or not he put mine on
his, I don't know, for after the crash came, we forgot to compare notes.
As the time grew near, not only Berri, but a good many fellows I knew
well began to treat me in a way I did n't understand and did n't like. I don't
know just how to describe the gradual change in their manner toward me,
because it was the sort of thing you feel without being able to put your
finger on the cause, or even on the change itself, without seeming morbid
and exaggerated. But I could n't help realizing that they treated me rather
coolly. They stopped coming to my room as often as they had been in the
habit of coming, they left me out of all sorts of little things I had always
been in before as a matter of course, and more than once, as I took my seat
at the table or went into somebody's room, I could see that my appearance
made the fellows uncomfortable for a moment, or at least gave the talk a
different turn. All this hurt my feelings terribly, and I tried to think what I

could have done to make the fellows I liked best and considered my friends
treat me this way. But I could n't think of a thing. I supposed I must have
done something without appreciating what the consequences would be. It
made me feel pretty badly, I can tell you, and several times I was on the
point of demanding an explanation; but they were all so polite and distant
and reserved that I never could bring myself to.
Of course, now I understand exactly why it was, and see how
hopelessly stupid I must have been not to have suspected anything. The
whole situation arose from the fact that there was a rumor in the class to the
effect that I was being considered for the First Ten,—a rumor that was
apparently given foundation by my being seen several times with Dick
Smith. This made the fellows instinctively avoid me a little, from a feeling
that I and the class generally might imagine that they were trying to swipe if
they went around much with me. It seems to me now particularly dense on
my part not to have had a glimmer of this, because it was just the way I felt
myself toward Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to the theatre one night with
Phil Blackwood, and two or three other men who were spoken of for the
First Ten. Yet I never dreamed that any one could look at me in this way.
Well, things went on, getting more whispery and panicky and
uncomfortable, until finally one night at the end of last month the crash
came. Just how anybody really knew that the Dickey was having its great
spring meeting for the purpose of electing the First Ten it would be
impossible to say, for I can't believe that it was breathed in so many words,
but we did know it, and we knew that it lasted for three days and three
nights before the decision was reached. Then——
In the afternoon Dick Smith overtook me in the street, and after
walking along for half a block, said abruptly,—

"By the way, Wood, stay in your room to-night," and then disappeared
in a doorway.
I think my heart stopped beating. I did n't dare let myself dwell on the
meaning of his words, but stumbled to my lecture and sat there, simply
dazed. At the end of the hour I ran back to my room. When I heard Berri
come in, I grabbed a book and stared at it blindly, without seeing a word;
but Berri passed along the hall to his own study without so much as
stopping at my open door. I did n't go to our table for luncheon; I slipped
into The Holly Tree later instead. But I could n't eat anything; I was so
excited and nervous and full of doubt and fright that I don't remember just
how I got through the afternoon. I know I tried to sit in my room, but gave
it up and buried myself for a while in one of the alcoves of the library. Later
I walked in back streets, and then ran all the way home, when the light
began to fade, fearing that something—I could n't bring myself to think just
what—might happen in my absence. By that time I was painfully hungry,
and managed to swallow a cup of tea and a piece of toast at The Holly Tree.
The evening was endless. I tried to read, but by the time I reached the
end of a sentence I had forgotten the beginning of it. Then I tried to write a
letter to mamma, but my hand trembled so that the writing scarcely looked
like mine at all, and anyhow I couldn't think of enough to fill the first page.
It was as if I were two distinct persons,—one trying to write a calm letter to
mamma, and the other in an agony of apprehension and uncertainty. I don't
know which was worse,—the feeling that the Dickey was coming for me, or
the feeling that perhaps it wasn't. Could Dick Smith have merely meant that
he might drop in to see me that evening? He had never been in my room,
and it seemed unlikely that he should come in that way. His manner, too, of
telling me to stay at home had been so odd, his leave-taking so abrupt. I

turned these things over in my mind interminably; then I would glance at
the clock and find the hands glued to the same old place.
To make things worse, Berri had come home almost as soon as I had,
and was in his room with the door shut. I longed to go in, but the feeling
that I wouldn't have anything to say if I did, kept me back. He made me
even more nervous than I really was by walking up and down, up and
down, and occasionally moving a chair as if he had run into it in his restless
promenade and were pushing it viciously out of the way. If his manner
hadn't been so strained and queer, I think I should have gone in anyhow and
relieved my mind. I did n't intend to do quite this, but at the end of about
two hours I could n't endure the lonely suspense any longer, and decided at
least to knock on his door and borrow something—I did n't know what
when I started. Mrs. Chester had forgotten to light the lamp in the hall, and
as I was feeling my way through the darkness and deciding that a match
would be the most plausible excuse for going in and then going out again
almost immediately, I bumped into somebody coming the other way. We
both jumped back, and I thought for a second that I was about to collapse at
the knees.
"Oh, it's you!" Berri exclaimed in a voice that I just recognized as his.
"Heavens! but you scared me. I was on my way to your room to borrow
your—your—your—to borrow— Oh, Granny!" He broke off with a kind of
gulp, and threw his arms around me. "Isn't this ghastly!" Then I knew that
he had been told to stay in his room too, and had been suffering the same
horrors. Ever since dinner he had been pacing the floor unable, just as I had
been, to make up his mind as to the exact significance of the advice to be at
home that evening. He could n't help feeling that it might have been a
mistake, that something would go wrong; and that again, if nothing did go

wrong, there was the hideous conjecture as to what would happen to you to
look forward to.
We sat down in my study,—Berri on the edge of a chair, his hands
folded with desperate calmness on his lap; I at my desk, where I found,
after a minute or two of strained silence, that I had dug a great hole in my
blotter and ruined a stylographic pen.
"If they do come," Berri at last whispered, "how do you think we ought
to be found? I don't know that it would be altogether the thing to be so—so
dressed and apparently waiting." Our extreme preparedness did seem rather
assuming, now that he spoke of it; I was far from wanting to appear cock-
sure of my election or of anything else to a fiendish mob such as we had
watched from my window that night in the autumn.
"And yet," I answered, "if we took off very much, I don't suppose they
would wait for us to dress; in fact, I don't think I could dress, and when I
came in, it seemed to be getting cool outsi—"
"Ssssshh! I thought I heard something," Berri broke in. He leaned
toward the window, and as the lamplight fell on his face, I saw for the first
time how pale he was. We listened. The clock ticked with a queer little hum
on two notes that I had never known it to make before; the student-lamp
grumbled twice, and each time the flame rose and fell; I had never noticed
this, either.
"I was perfectly sure," Berri whispered. His whisper was several times
louder than his ordinary tone.
"How do you think it would do to take off our coats and neckties?" I
suggested. "That would look as if we had begun to get ready for bed
without any suspicion of—of—It; and at the same time we would have
pretty much everything on."

"You talk now as if you had made up your mind that they were
coming," Berri said nervously. "Do you think they are?" The fact of his
asking me this dropped me back once more into all the sickening doubt
from which for a minute or two I had been unconsciously lifted.
"I don't know," I faltered. "What do you think?" But instead of telling
me Berri exclaimed,—
"Oh, this is awful!" and began to walk up and down the room. As he
walked he took off his coat and threw it in a corner; then he gave the end of
his necktie a jerk that not only undid the knot but ripped his shirt open from
his neck to his shoulders, for he had forgotten that on one side the thing was
pinned. I don't think he realized what he was doing, as he went on pulling
and pulling until he had torn out a narrow strip of linen at least a foot and a
half long. Berri, pacing the floor and tearing himself to pieces in a nervous
frenzy as he paced, struck me all at once as the funniest thing I had ever
seen, and I began, first to giggle, and then to laugh with the kind of laughter
that takes possession of you all over and leaves you helpless.
I was leaning back in my chair, weak and hysterical, when Berri
stopped as abruptly as if he had been shot, and stood petrified in the middle
of the room. Away in the distance the chanting cry of the Dickey had begun
to rise and fall, die with a tenor wail and begin again; my laughter died with
it, and as I lay there, hypnotized by the sound, I think I must have forgotten
to close my mouth, for when Berri spoke again, my throat was parched and
rough. Perhaps he did n't speak—I think he just made a feeble motion with
his hand that I interpreted as a sign to take off my coat and necktie. But I
couldn't act on it; I could n't do anything but lean back with my eyes fixed,
and listen to the approaching song. It grew louder and louder, clearer and
clearer, fiercer and fiercer, until it broke all at once into a great roar, and I
knew that they had turned the corner and were coming down our little

street. Then I felt Berri's hand in mine,—it was cold and wet,—and he was
saying incoherently,—
"Good by, Granny—I mustn't be found in your room—good-by—I
must be found in my own room—reading a book—yes—reading a book—
good-by." Then the exultant song and the heavy rhythm of feet under my
window suddenly stopped; there was a moment almost of silence, followed
by a hoarse yell from what seemed like a thousand savage throats. In the
pandemonium my ears distinguished here and there the sound of my own
name shouted and shrieked in various tones of impatient, unbridled,
vindictive eagerness, and for a second my thoughts flashed back to the night
Berri and I had seen some one else pulled out. That had thrilled me, but this
reduced me to a quaking pulp.
The door downstairs crashed back—there was a deafening scramble on
the tin steps—my own door burst open—the room was full of greedy hands
and vengeful faces. I was lifted—hurled through the air out into the hall and
down the stairs in two thuds—across the piazza, down the steps, along the
walk, out of the gate between a double line of executioners into the hungry
mob that dragged me this way and that, tore at my hair and clothes, rolled
me in the dirt, and finally jerked me upright, linked my arms in those of
some other neophytes (I could n't see who they were), and started me down
the street with a kick. We swayed off—a million devils behind us—roaring
the Dickey song, as we had been commanded to, at the top of our lungs.

XVII[#]

[#] For obvious reasons, certain parts of Granny Wood's diary have not been printed. Of the passages

that refer to the Dickey, only those describing the society's public practices have been retained.—The

Editor.

Most of the time I was on my knees. There were only two moments of relief
in the painful march; they came when the crowd stopped to pull out two
other unfortunates and hurl them, as I had been hurled, from their respective
front doors. For the time being (it was a very short time, however) the rest
of us were neglected; but as soon as the arms of our fellow neophyte were
linked in ours, the irresistible impetus from behind began once more and we
continued our perilous way.
At last all ten of us were shoved—a dazed and gasping semicircle—up
the steps of Claverly Hall, and our names were cheered in the order of our
election. With the exception of Berri, I had n't known before who the others
were. In the darkness and excitement it had been impossible to see. There
was something ominous and depressing in the cheers they gave us. Berri
said, in talking about it the week afterward, that it was as if the cannibal
band should cheer the missionary. Then the crowd melted away with vague
threats as to what was to come, and I was taken back to my room, weary
and stupid, by Dick Smith. He was to be my guide and only friend during
the week that was to follow. Before he left me, he told me the conditions of
my servitude.

* * * * * * *

That week was the longest and most absolutely wretched of my life, I think;
although now that it is over, I would n't give up the memory of it for almost
anything. Even in the midst of it the idea of chucking the whole thing, as I
suppose I might have done, never occurred to me. I could at times conceive

of my giving out, but never of my giving up. The first day of my "running,"
as it is called, from six in the morning until ten o'clock at night, was one
long embarrassment, mortification, and mental agony to me. I set my teeth
and forced myself through it doggedly. The days that followed were just as
bad,—even worse, perhaps,—but I did n't have to compel myself to do
things. I went through them mechanically; where almost everything was a
hideous nightmare, no one incident, after a time, had the power to
overwhelm me as at first. I was too tired and dirty and unshaven and cowed
to care particularly what they made me do, or to have a feeling of any kind,
other than one of hopeless submission. In the morning after an early
breakfast at The Holly Tree * * * * * * * * * * *
Then some one, usually three or four, would get hold of me and make
me do perfectly awful things in the College Yard or on the streets. I had to
perform so many crazy acts that I can't remember them all, or on what days
they came, and, as I said, I grew perfectly indifferent to what I had to do or
who saw me do it.
One warm afternoon they made me put on three soft, thick sweaters
and then took me to a drug-store in the Square, where they poured over me
half the contents of a long line of perfumery bottles on the counter,—white-
rose, heliotrope, patchouly, musk, ylangylang, violet, bay-rum, and several
kinds of cologne,—all the deadly scents that one investigates while waiting
for a prescription to be put up. Then we got on an electric car,—the fellows
who were running me at one end, and I at the other. They of course (after
instructing me to snuggle up to my fellow passengers,—refined old ladies
and peevish middle-aged gentlemen in particular) pretended to ignore me.
But the other passengers did n't. Everybody I sat next to would turn, after
about three seconds, look at me with a slight contraction of the nostrils, and
then move away; in less than ten seconds more they would be on the other

side of the car. It was not long before I had one side of the car all to myself.
Then—this also I had been ordered to do—when we reached the edge of the
bridge, I jumped up and, as a sort of climax, "threw a fit." Passengers in
street cars always find this very trying, especially if you fall down in the
aisle foaming at the mouth and clutch at their feet. Before my five days of
running were over, I grew exceedingly expert at throwing fits. I certainly
had enough practice at it. Well, when we got across the bridge I was hustled
out of the car into a drug-store, where I recovered in time to catch the next
car back—and do the whole thing over again.
It was on the evening of that day, I think, that they took me to the
theatre—or, I should say, the theatres, as we visited several. (They had in
the mean time taken off the perfume-soaked garments, not through
consideration for my feelings, but for their own.) One might think that,
under the circumstances, going to the theatre would have been a delightful
rest. But it wasn't. I had a seat all to myself down in front, and the fellows
who took me sat ten or twelve rows back. Beyond the fact that the first play
we went to was a nice, staid performance that had attracted a large and very
"dressy" audience, I have no recollection of it; for my thoughts were all
centred on the dreadful thing that was going to happen at the end of the first
act.
The curtain went down; there was a polite flutter of applause, and then,
while the orchestra was getting ready and the house was perfectly quiet
except for a murmur of talk, I stood up, facing everybody, and exclaimed in
a loud, distinct voice,—
"This show is bum, and I want my money back."
The effect was electrical. All conversation stopped instantly, and I
could actually hear the craning of necks from one end of the theatre to the
other.

"This show is bum, and I want my money back," I declared again,
louder than before. Some men near me began to laugh; the ladies looked
scared to death, and from the gallery came a wild clapping of hands and
yells of, "That's no lie," and "He's all right." Whereupon (as per
instructions) I began to yell the thing over and over again at the top of my
voice, and kept it up until four ushers skated down the aisle and threw me
out, still yelling. I had visions, as I flew along toward the exit, of white-
faced women indulging in hysterics. I did this at two other shows, and the
fellows regretted very much that there didn't happen to be any five-act plays
in town, for they said my technique got better and better as the evening
went on.
Then I spent whole afternoons in creeping up behind the sparrows in
the Square and endeavoring to put salt on their tails; in going from shop to
shop trying to get the clerks to change a cent; in holding up baby carriages,
kissing the occupants and then remarking that I was "passionately fond of
animals." (I kissed fifty-six babies on Commonwealth Avenue in one
afternoon.) I stalked Indians with a little bow and arrow in the Yard one
morning between lectures (cutting lectures is n't allowed), craftily creeping
from tree to tree, hiding a moment, peeping out warily, and finally
exclaiming as I shot an arrow and dashed into the open,—
"Bang—and another red-skin bit the dust."
This was one of the few times (except in the evening) that I saw Berri
during the entire week. He was walking up and down the stone parapet of
Matthews with a silly little false red fringe of beard around his neck,
proclaiming to all the passers-by,—
"Listen to me; I am a Berrisford of Salem."
In a pair of green tights and on horseback, I distributed armfuls of the
"smuggled" cigars from Santa Bawthawthawthoth to the inhabitants of

Cambridgeport, and when a great crowd had collected around me, delivered
a lecture on the evils of smoking. I intercepted at various times many
respectable old ladies on their way across the streets, for the purpose of
confidentially whispering,—
"Madam, I regret to inform you that you are holding your skirts just a
leetle too high."
I also had to stop car after car, put my foot on the step, tie my
shoestring, and then stand back, saying to the conductor,—
"Thank you, you may go on now." This is an old game, but it's a great
favorite.
Two things happened (and only two) that I liked. One was when I had
to call on a girl in town—I had never seen her before—and write all my part
of the conversation on a slate. She was very pretty and good to me; for
instead of being disgusted at my appearance (she had every reason to be)
and having me put out of the house, she made me sit down and ordered tea
(I realized, for the first time, how nice tea could be) and was altogether a
perfect peach. She said, among other things, that she had been at the theatre
the night I made the row. I wrote on the slate, "Which one? The
performance was given by special request at three different places," which
made her laugh. I stayed talking, or rather writing, to her for more than half
an hour. The fellows who had brought me to the door were very angry; for,
thinking that I would be chased away by a husky footman at the end of a
minute or two, they had n't told me how long to stay and were waiting
outside to see what happened. When at last I got up to go, the pretty girl
held out her hand very graciously and said,—
"We'll meet again someday, I'm sure," and I wrote on the slate,—
"It will not be my fault if we don't. Good-by!" She took the slate and
the pencil, drew a line through the last word, and wrote under it,—

"Au revoir." Then I left. I did meet her again very soon afterwards, at
the Beck spread on Class Day. She was the prettiest girl there. She 's going
abroad in three days, and as papa let me engage passage for our trip (he and
mamma and Mildred will be here to morrow), it did n't take me long to
decide on the steamer. When he found that I had picked out, for no apparent
reason, one of the old Cunarders sailing from Boston, he was perfectly
furious. But it's too late for him to change now.
The other thing I enjoyed during my running was the day that Mr.
Fleetwood stole me away from some fellows and took me up to his room
overlooking the Yard. He is an old Dickey man himself, and had as much
right to my services as any one. I embarrassed him at first, I think.
Strangely enough, I appreciated this a little even then, when I had no
business to be appreciating anything beyond the fact that I was a mere
grovelling worm. He sat down, when we went into his room, and looked at
me curiously, diffidently, for a moment, as if he did n't quite know how to
begin. Then he said with something of an effort, as if he considered himself
a little foolish to say anything,—
"What, pray, is your name?" I gave the required answer, at which he
smiled—rather sadly, I thought; although I did n't see what reason he had to
look that way. Then he asked me to do several things,—old, old things that
neophytes probably had to do when the Dickey was first started; things that
have become conventions; the kind of things you are always asked to do by
fellows who have n't enough imagination to think of anything new. He gave
his commands (with him, however, they became requests) slowly, as if he
couldn't remember just how they went. And he didn't always express them
the way the fellows do. I could n't help feeling that if Shakespeare had ever
tried to torment a neophyte, he had done it in very much the same way. He
scarcely noticed my attempts to do what he asked. He was interested, I

think, not so much in discovering my feeble talents as in recalling the
general situation. But he stopped doing even this in a short time, and got up
and went over to the open window and looked out into the wilderness of
elm leaves and down at the cool, shady stretches of grass and the yellow
paths of the Yard.
I really think he forgot all about me, for I stood there an interminable
time waiting for him to turn around. Just before he did turn, he yawned and
said listlessly to himself,—
"Well, I suppose it's as it should be." He must have said this to himself,
as he seemed surprised to find me standing patiently in the middle of the
room where he had left me.
"My dear boy, sit down, sit down," he exclaimed,—"that is, unless you
would rather go away." I answered that I should rather stay there if he did
n't mind. It was so cool and quiet and safe in his room; I knew that no one
could ever find me, and I was very tired.
"I have some themes to read," Fleetwood went on, "but you won't
disturb me. Do whatever you want to, and if you feel like it, talk."
We did talk a little. Then I stretched out on his divan and tried to read;
but before I had finished half a chapter I drifted away into the most blissful
sleep I 've ever had. I can just remember the whispering sound of footsteps
on the pavement under the windows, and the rustle of the crisp new leaves.
When I awoke the room was dark. There was a sheet of paper pinned to my
coat, and when I got into the lighted corridor I saw written on it,—
"In reply to any questions as to your disappearance, you may truthfully
explain that you did a difficult and important bit of work for W. J.
Fleetwood." I don't know yet what he meant. Some day next year I think I
'll ask him. I don't believe I know any one who is so very clever and so very
kind.

The next night—the last—the night of the * * * * * * * * * * * *

XVIII

It was only natural, I suppose, that for a week or so after we had become
full-fledged Dickey men the First Ten should have stuck pretty close
together. We had such a lot to talk about,—things that we could n't very
well talk about to outsiders. To tell the truth, the rest of the class for a time
seemed like outsiders to me. They had n't been through what we had, and I
confess that I could n't help looking on our little crowd as something apart
from the others and, taken all in all, rather extraordinary. I don't know that I
thought this in so many words, but I did feel it; and it was Berri—of all
persons—who brought me back to earth one day with a jerk. I forget just
what I said to call forth his remarks, but it was something in the nature of a
complaint that the fellows at the table did n't seem to have as much time for
me, so to speak, as they once had. Berri puffed at his pipe for a while and
stared at the ceiling, and finally said,—
"Of course, I see what you mean; but it's not them, you know—it's us."
"I'm sure I don't think—" I began defensively.
"No, I don't believe you do realize the true state of affairs," Berri
interrupted. "Lots of fellows would, and then pretend all the time that they
did n't; that's what I do. But you don't. You just have the big-head from pure
delight, and go around swelled up like a hop-toad without in the least
knowing it. Your old friends know it, though, and it naturally makes them a
dash tired. And besides, what do you expect them to do, anyhow? Run after
us? Of course they won't do that. In the first place, we 've both become

rather obnoxious; I don't mind it in myself, but with you it's scarcely in
character. And in the second place, none of the fellows at our table are
swipes, and if any advances are made, well, they won't make them. So there
you are!"
There was nothing much to say to this, because, after a few minutes of
resentment, I felt all over that it was perfectly true. I did n't say anything,
but you bet it was n't more than a day or two before the fellows seemed to
me just the way they always had seemed. I think I had a pretty close call; I
might have turned into a Dick Benton.
Three days before Class Day, who should blow in but Duggie? He
literally did blow in, come to think of it, as he crossed from Cadiz in a
sailing-vessel and was as brown as a Spaniard. He brought Mrs. Chester a
black lace shawl, and told her that if she 'd drape it around her head and sit
at her upstairs window some evening, he 'd come and serenade her. To
which the old girl responded with one of her roguish little digs at Duggie's
ribs, and exclaimed,—
"Land sakes, Mr. Duggie, you can't sing, and never could."
Duggie wanted Berri and me to dine with him that evening, but Berri's
last examination was to come the next morning (I had finished all of mine)
and he could n't. I did, though, and we walked out to Cambridge afterwards
in the moonlight. He told me all about his trip, and when I let him know
that we were going abroad for the summer and that Berri was going over
with us to join his mother at Dinard, he said,—
"I had a letter from Berri in answer to mine. I don't often keep letters,
but I 've kept his. I suppose you know I did n't think much of Berri at first,
but I don't mind confessing that I sized him up all wrong."
It was such a beautiful night that when we got to our gate, it seemed
like wasting something to go in the house. Berri had finished his grind and

was leaning out of my window. He said that his brain felt like a dead
jellyfish (I think that was the pretty simile), and told us not to go in, as he
would put on his coat and come down to us. So we strolled, all three, over
to the Yard, and sat on the steps in front of one of the Holworthy entries. It
was very late, but the finals were not yet over, and the yellow of many
windows blurred through the trees. The long quadrangle was flecked with
moonlight, and little groups like our own were sitting in front of almost
every doorway. The Yard, except on great occasions, is rarely noisy, and
that night it seemed particularly quiet,—a kind of lull before the crash of
Class Day and Commencement.
Duggie and Berri and I sat there talking until the air and the sky had
changed from summer night to summer morning. Even then a few of the
windows were still glowing.

THE END.

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