The engine whistles it, the crowd shouts it, and the hills give it back again as the laden train slips down to the main line and starts on its way to town. Streaming with cardinal bunting, it looks like a burning thing as it rushes over the marsh land, sending the horses in the field snorting away, and bringing women to the doors of cottages along the tracks. In their excitement the delirious Sophomores and Juniors hang out of the windows and throw kisses wildly to these women, who grin and wave back, doubtless saying something about "them crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags.

From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations, and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes.

Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip upstairs under the protecting shadow of the associate coach, passing the suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great fresh specimen of the lustiest student-body in the world. You take his hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.

Diemann found Ashley quiet in his room. The fullback was in splendid fettle; the week at the Springs had done him a world of good. There was no staleness about him now. It had helped him to be away from the College, away from that excited crowd that sat on the bleachers and watched him play, demanding that he be like Blake, who had died. He breathed more easily in the quiet air of the mountains where the team had secret practice. People stopped urging him to be like Blake; only Diemann went over the thing again and again, explaining, reminding. Now Thanksgiving had come, and the substitute fullback had never felt better in his life. He would do his best, and they could not say he had not tried.

The manager was radiant over Ashley's condition, and the other men slapped Tom's big shoulders and said that he would put up a good game for the College. Diemann alone seemed sour-balled. The rest of them knew how Blake's death had broken him up, but that was no reason, Lyman said, why he need keep nagging the new fullback about Fred. The College realized that the two men were hopelessly different, and they were fairly reconciled by this time. If the boy played the best that was in him, the team might make it in spite of the odds. It was too bad to take the spirit out of him by constantly suggesting that he play like Blake. The manager said this to Diemann, but the coach only shook his head and answered:

"It won't do any harm, Frank, and it may possibly work him up to something like Fred's game."

But a week's watching at the Springs had made Diemann despondent. The phenomenon he had witnessed the evening of the last practice had not appeared again. He had allowed his theories to lead him away into impossible hopes. The man on the bed was Ashley, slow, normal, in perfect condition, hopeless, and Ashley he would remain. The chance for a psychic manifestation ceased when Ashley's football worry was over. Opportunity had come and gone, unfruitfully.

That afternoon, the athletic grounds were banked with great flower-beds of people, where red and blue and yellow blossomed and faded and burst out again as the teams swayed back and forward on the white-lined gridiron between. The wild noise of the college yells greeting the teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands, the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the hoarse bellow of the brown paper megaphones,—all this tumult had hushed suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other for the kick-off.

The uproar boomed forth again, and presently the Stanford bleachers became silent from breathless watching. The first five minutes of play meant most to the cardinal. In that dozen rushes, they could tell whether there was a chance of winning or whether the hope of victory had died with Blake. The first Berkeley play went at the line and crumpled up without gain; again it held and again, until the crowd felt that there was more than hope, that the Stanford stone-wall defense would win out once more. Yet so closely were the teams matched that they swung back and forth without score for a good half.

When the game was almost at the end of the second half, the score was tie, 6-6. But Berkeley was sure of the day. She had forced her adversaries to their five-yard line, and there were only six minutes left to play. Stanford took a desperate brace and Berkeley lost the ball on downs. If only Stanford could gain ground now, or if time could be called. Nobody wanted a tie, to be sure, but defeat was hard to accept,—the first time, too.

Diemann of Stanford crouched on the side-lines with a heart of lead. The game was lost. What he had looked for, hoping against hope since play was called, had not happened. Ashley had played his usual hard, consistent game, straining every muscle, punting longer and higher than ever before, but missing stupidly some golden chances, the chances Blake would never have let slip by. Diemann had talked to him between halves, a few eager words, urging him to quickness, reminding him of Fred. The substitute had only shaken his head, and muttered that he was doing his best. Toward the end of the second he had shown the severity of the strain. Playing his hardest, with despair in his soul, it had told on him. In the last scrimmages his work had been very ragged. Indeed, the whole team seemed to have slumped, and the Berkeley line had hammered them down toward their own goal while precious seconds slipped by.

Now the men lined up rapidly. Stanford tried an end play. No gain. Diemann stood back of the team at one side of the goal; he was struggling hard to be calm, but he did a strange thing. He seized a small megaphone from the hands of an urchin beside him, and just as they lined up after Stanford's unsuccessful trial at end, he stepped to the white goal line and raising the funnel to his lips shouted in a voice audible to every man on both teams:

"Now, Fred Blake, play your game!"

Lyman heard and looked back, wondering.

Ashley heard. He stared at the grandstand with a bewildered, appealing face. Then the signal was given. It sent Ashley through tackle. The boy, feeling as though he had lost the game for his College where the other man would have won, went into the line with the energy of a forlorn hope. The Berkeley men gathered their superior force, and the Stanford team was lifted up and borne back, a gradually shifting mass, to its own goal line.

Were they over? The Berkeley crowd yelled, and an exultant sub threw his sweater in the air. No, the teams were up, and the ball was almost on the line, not quite. There remained a chance to punt it out of danger. Could Ashley do it quickly enough? He had been punting too slowly; the other line could surely get through and block his kick, and there were only two minutes to play.

Diemann, rigid with anxiety, saw that a Stanford man still lay on the ground. Straining his eyes through the dusk, a glance at the team told him that it was Ashley. The drawn muscles of the instructor's legs trembled, the blood beat in his temples. Was it coming, at the last moment?

As the trainer shot out from the side-lines with bucket and sponge, Diemann saw Ashley spring up, slap the grimy moleskins of the men nearest him, and get back into position to kick. Stanford was standing on her own goal line. He saw the ball snapped back; the fullback kicked it, in time; then, instead of the long, curving drive that was to save the day, he saw the ball rise almost straight in the air above the teams, and he groaned aloud as the Berkeley men broke through, and people with delirious laughter waved the blue and gold frantically about him.

The ball comes down among the struggling players. Suddenly, out of that jumble of men darts a red-sleeved figure, dashing through the scattered field, bounding like a stag toward the Berkeley goal.

The expert eye of the associate coach tells him that, by a marvellous piece of football instinct, Ashley has found his way through the confused teams, realizing that he is the only Stanford man on side, and has caught the ball on the fly and got clear with it. Though they understand nothing of this, the vast crowd goes shrieking to its feet. The bewildered teams turn and follow close upon the flying figure, the speedy Berkeley right-half leading them. Back in the field stands the U. C. fullback, grimly waiting. The two collide, and the chasing halfback gains; but the Berkeley back drops to the tackle a fraction of an instant too late and runs fair against a straight-arm. Tom Ashley, with the ball clutched tight against his breast, his set face gleaming white in the half-light, sprints down the long barred space toward victory, keeping the distance between himself and the straining pack, running as only one man has ever run for Stanford.

And Diemann, tearing along the side-line, knows that Ashley himself never could have done it.

The fullback falls across the line, the ball gripped in his convulsive hold, just as the linesman's whistle blows. Diemann is there almost as soon. He keeps back the frenzied men crowding about them, and bends over the unconscious player, calling him "Fred" irrationally, while the place catches fire with the cardinal and Stanford goes mad on the field.

Ashley came to consciousness at the hotel. Diemann sat beside him, and Lyman and Dr. Forest stood by the window. The substitute fullback sat up.

"I felt faint just then," he said. "I couldn't help it; you know about it, Diemann." He looked at the other men.

"Did they get it over?" he asked.

Lyman ran across the room.

"Tom, old man," he said, choking, "you won it for us, and you'll never be forgotten, you and your run!"

The fullback looked at him blankly.

"My run?" he faltered.

Diemann came between them.

"Better lie down and rest a bit, my boy; you can talk later."

Then, turning to the others:

"You see," he whispered, "he's wandering a little yet."

TWO PIONEERS AND AN AUDIENCE.

Two Pioneers and an Audience.

These old men had been out of college for two whole years. One of them was Ralph Shirlock. If you were at college in his days you knew him by sight, at least, though you were the mossiest dig that ever kept bright till morning the attic window of a prof's house on the Row. If you have come up to College since then, and are sufficiently posted to know that there have been other annuals before this one just issued by your friends the Juniors, you have found his picture or his name on every other page of the earlier editions. Harry Rice, who came with him, was not half so well known, save to the Faculty and the circle of the chapter. He was doing very well in business, people said, better than Shirlock, probably. Rice was a keen fellow, the new men could see that at a glance; but they did not put an arm about him instinctively in the after-dinner stroll, as they did about Shirlock.

The two alumni had spent Sunday calling upon the Faculty in Palo Alto and the Row, and in post-mortems with some of the football men in Encina. After dinner, the fellows sat out on the porch, strumming mandolins and singing. Shirlock had been a star on the Glee Club two years before, and he sang again the songs the college hummed after him in those days, while the upper-classmen looked at the Freshmen with a "now-you-see-what-you've-joined" expression, or nudged each other reminiscently, until the live-oaks in the pasture almost blended with the long shadows under them, and hoarse-throated frogs were tuning up in the irrigating ditches. Then they formed four abreast and went down for the mail, humming a march song and lifting their hats in concert to Professor Stillwell and his wife, smiling from their porch. At the post-office the lines broke and the entire body, except the alumni, struggled into the over-crowded room ("the daily press" Pellams called it). This was hardly necessary, since one man could have opened the fraternity box and distributed the letters; but this is a distinct charm of Sunday evening at the post-office. Moreover, you never know who may be standing inside, and if you have forgotten to arrange things ahead it is sometimes well to be first.

The pleasant uncertainty of the evening mail being over, the fellows mixed a while with the sundry groups about the low red building, then joined forces again, and marched once around the Quad, arm in arm, a line of sixteen, while Bob Duncan, who had been prepped at a military school, shouted, "Change step, march," and "Left wheel, march," then home together, all but two or three, who were called the "Incurables," and who had plunged back into the shadow of the Quad for Chapel, perhaps, or some other form of Sabbath evening devotion. This breach of hospitality the alumni forgave, made indulgent by a sweet sympathy.

Alas for you, old worshippers at empty shrines! Those divine presences are gone, new and unknown deities queen it in the ancient temples. Go back to the hearth where some still know you and talk to the few who gather around you there, of the old days when you, too, placed your offering at celestial feet. These men of a new generation, sitting in places that once were yours, will listen indulgently to your stories of the past, and hear with patience the odious comparisons you inevitably make; they will thank you for the advice you give them, and say something pleasant about your college spirit; then in the morning when you have taken the early train back to the World, they will go down to the Quad with their books under their arms and something in their minds that is anything but your talk of the evening before; the College life will go on very much as if you had not been back, O wise fossils, and there will be new graduates going out to learn your lessons and new undergraduates who will pay no attention to them in turn. So be thankful for this brief hour before the fire, with its chat as light as the tobacco smoke floating over "old" man and Freshman lounging together, be glad of the fellowship that welcomes you, and be content.

Each couch in the smoking-room had its load of sprawling figures. The lights were out by this time and the Incurables had come back to the house and ferreted places for themselves among the tangled golf suits and 'Varsity sweaters. Duncan had a lamp on the table where he was "bossing a rabbit"; Pellams said this was the only kind of lab-work in zoology in which Bob could get credit. A pile of plates warmed before the fire where Smith was toasting crackers at the end of a sharpened stick. At the piano, Pellams was softly playing "barber shop" chords. It was all very lazy and comfortable. The alumni grew reminiscent.

"This noon while we were walking up from Palo Alto," said Shirlock, "Mrs. Stanford passed us in her carriage, coming from Chapel, I suppose. I asked Harry if he remembered how they used to drive about the place inspecting things, when the Senator was alive."

"Of course I do," spoke up Rice, "it seems odd that there are so few in college now who remember them together. To you fellows, I suppose, Mrs. Stanford is the source of the University. To us who saw them stand together on the platform that day in October, '91, it is the two always."

"Harry, do you remember our serenade at the residence, after they returned from Washington the first time?"

"No," answered Rice, "I remember, but I wasn't there. We played a game somewhere that day and I stayed over and missed the fun."

"Tell us about it, Ralph," said Duncan, as he emptied the cubes of cheese into the chafing-dish.

"Well, you see," said Shirlock, unbraiding himself from two affectionate under-classmen on the couch and sitting up in the light, "the story really begins with the first football game, which came off in the spring of '92, and was ours, as every Freshman can tell you, even though he doesn't know just what is meant by 'Pioneers.' The day of the game, Whittemore, the captain, got a telegram from Washington wishing us luck in our first encounter, and that afternoon we sent back answer in much the same style that Cæsar used on one occasion—I suppose the little man to my left here can give me the Latin words?" he added, rumpling the hair of a horizontal Freshman.

"Not long afterward the Senator and Mrs. Stanford came back from the East and someone over in the Hall proposed that we give them a welcome home. We could get a bigger demonstration there in those days than you can now, I'll bet; you know everybody who was anybody at all lived in Encina then; that was the center of the College life, politics began and grew up there, and it was over there in the old lobby that we started the Stanford spirit. Things were great, that first year. It's all right enough here by our own fireside, with our own little gang, but I tell you honestly if things could have lasted as they were that first year, I wouldn't have wanted to come over here. We were all together, right in line for everything, wise or foolish."

"It was the student body then, all right," put in Rice, "and we had the Faculty with us too whether we were around the gridiron, where they first had it, east of the cinder path, you know, learning the yell and incidentally getting the team into condition for that 14-10, or whether we were crawling by our lonelies through the fence over in the vineyard."

sang Pellams from the piano.

"Were there any profs on that flat-car?" interrupted Duncan. He had come into College while a memory of that pioneer adventure yet lingered.

"It's unkind to remind us of that affair! No, I don't think there were. The Faculty had their fun later, and we put mourning wreaths on several chairs in the dining-room."

"And you came mighty near getting a bouquet of the same kind, yourself," said Rice.

"What was it about the flat-car?" inquired a voice from the pillows.

"Oh," said Rice, "that was about the first of those senseless ebullitions of youth that the Shirlock person usually identified himself with. There was a flat-car standing outside Encina on the track there, just about where it turns and slopes down crosslots to the main track. This is just what Ralph and his precious gang wanted, of course; they thought it would be a bit of innocent, boyish play to have a little free railroading, so they piled on and turned her loose and slid down to Mayfield. They barely stopped the car before she switched into the main line, and they all fell off into the gopher holes along the side and made for Mayfield, red-eyed. The Faculty raised Ned when they heard about it, which was proper."

"I hope the Freshmen will pay particular attention to Mr. Rice," said Shirlock. "He is a noble influence to any sweet, unfolding soul. I feel that I should have escaped a great deal of enjoyable sin had I only known him better those first few weeks."

Ralph got up for some cigarette tobacco from the skull on the mantelpiece.

"Well, the Faculty were with us in about everything," he went on, rolling a cigarette; "many of them lived in the Hall then."

"Yes, a number did," put in Rice. "Do you remember, Ralph, the night that Professor Torts had his little beer-and-skittles party in his lair, and Burns, who roomed across the passage and who was the worst bummer in Encina, went down to Fessler, and complained that he couldn't study because of the noise in that number? And Fessler forgot who roomed there and came up and gave them Tartarus through the keyhole and nearly dropped when Torts opened the door?"

"We all enjoyed that," answered Shirlock. "Why, the profs used to come to our feeds and jolly up with the crowd. Often they were the best fun there. It's different now."

"Oh, I don't know," said Duncan, "they come over off and on, now. Doc Jordan was here last Sunday to dinner, and Diemann drops in sometimes; last year he came a lot."

"Oh, they come over all right," sighed Pellams from the piano. "I had a report to make one day. I didn't have it done, and I bribed Ted to go down and tell Engbee I was sick in bed. I was playing cards in here when Sniffles rushed in and told me the old boy was coming up the street. I smelt danger and tumbled into bed like a six-day bicyclist, and fixed my face up with some grease paint and magnesia. Sure enough, he came in, darkly suspicious, thought he had me all right, but he found a wreck that melted him. His wife sent me a bunch of violets next morning. For my part I don't like the Faculty for intimate friends," and Pellams played "Comrades" with the soft pedal down.

"It's not the same thing, though, really," persisted Shirlock. "They may come over here to dinner or perhaps to a smoker, but it's always Professor So-and-So; his chair is a little higher than any of yours, and he never forgets the family waiting for him in the Row; in those first days the family was in most cases beyond the Rockies, or as yet a dream, and it wasn't always easy to pick out the professor from the jumble of story-tellers on the bed.

"Of course, it was all too good to last," the alumnus went on thoughtfully, "and it wasn't natural it should. We weren't so many then. When the number increased, I suppose the relations had to change and the different cliques must separate. I'll admit that there is more in the life now, it's more complex, there are more institutions and more ways of having joy; but those were good old days, those first days in Encina when the crowd was one.

"I can see them now, can't you, Harry? out on the veranda and the steps of the Hall after dinner, with the fellows playing ball on the lawn, and other men sitting up on their window-ledges. The night I started to tell you about, when we went to serenade Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, we got the mandolin fellows, the beginning of your present club, and fell in behind them and started off down the road, past the mausoleum and through the vineyard—never broke ranks there, either, we were on our good behavior, besides, it was Spring—and so on over to the house, where we drew up, and the mandolins played their piece, then we gave the yell—it was only a few months old, that yell, but it had been loud enough to knock out a twenty-five-year-old one we met up in town not long before, and we were proud of it.

"During the pause that followed, the front door opened and the Senator stepped out on the porch; a lamp shone on his gray head and on us fellows in a big black crowd on the gravel below, looking up at him and cheering. When we stopped he said, very much as though a friend had driven up, "Gentlemen, will you come in?" and the whole two hundred of us piled over the piazza, getting a grasp of his hand as we came into the hall, and a word from Mrs. Stanford, who stood beside him. They took us into the library; we formed a hollow square, two rows deep on the sides, and the Founders came into the square and talked to us. I remember that Mrs. Stanford said, 'We were very glad, young gentlemen, to hear of your success in baseball,' and what a chill it gave us, just convalescing from the football fever; but we forgave the mistake when she asked, a minute later, 'Which is Mr. Clemans?' That blushing hero with the other ten we forced into the center to be congratulated, and we sang the new song, 'Rush the Ball Along,' until the bric-à-brac trembled.

"When we were quiet again, the Senator talked to us informally, as though we were in reality his children as he had said we were to be. It was an earnest talk, about his ideals of what the University was yet to be, and his hope for their fulfillment; of economy and judicious living; and of endeavor to be of use to the world. It was a privilege to stand there listening. He appealed to each one of us individually. We could not know then how few more such opportunities we were to have. When he had finished, the dining-room doors slid back—it was a put-up job, that serenade—and it was Mrs. Stanford's turn. After the supper, we gathered for a little personal talk with both of them, then we had some more mandolin music, and Baker sang 'Suwanee River' to Capron's accompaniment.

"That evening brought the Founders pretty close to the crowd. It was a good thing to have happen, it began things right. Then, you know, he died suddenly, in vacation. I was in Yosemite. When term opened, it was hard to get used to seeing her driving around the campus alone. I don't think any of the people who came after those early days can ever be so loyal to the Founders, to the person of one and the memory of the other, as we are. I'm sure none of us who went over serenading that night will ever forget it. It's one of the Pioneer memories."

Both graduates were looking into the fire. Freshman Haviland snored softly in the window seat. The eyes of the rest of the chapter were fastened on the chafing-dish. Shirlock's story had seemed pretty long and the rarebit sent out a tantalizing odor.

Duncan called out, "Supper's ready, children," and the heated plates came clattering up from the hearth, bringing the visitors back from the far echoes of their own beginnings to the noisy unconcern of a Freshman year that knew a kind, white-bearded face from pictures only, and never could understand.

FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT.

For the Sake of Argument.

Pellams answered in vague interrogation, not a little surprised, himself, to be caught at a "girl-supper." Now that he was cornered, it would be uselessly impolite to tell her how the Chapter had reasoned and pleaded with him until at the last minute "Cap" Smith ruined his clever escape by catching him midway down a porch pillar. Smith, sitting on the other side of Katharine Graham and wearing the smile of satisfied revenge, would doubtless enjoy telling it. There was so much of genial malevolence in that smile that Pellams, the woman-hater, who knew only enough of the co-eds to avoid them, wondered what sort of a girl he had been placed next to at supper. He had an intuitive idea that she had been given him by general consent. An experienced society man would have scented this at once in the company of Mrs. Perkins, for when there is a choice of tables, chapter-mothers are apt to sit where there is the least sentiment; but this was the Junior's début, practically, and he was conscious of little more than that the fellows had it "in" for him, and that this girl had begun the conversation by a personal remark.

"I judged," the girl was saying, not having waited for any explanation, "that in the milder forms of social entertainment you were somewhat out of your element."

Pellams had missed his guess. On sitting down to their small table, he had decided that the conversation would naturally split into two divisions of three rather than into three couples, for Mrs. Perkins, Professor Grind and this Meiggs girl would enjoy themselves together, leaving him to share Smith's talk with Miss Graham, whose eyes had somehow an engaging twinkle. The idea was rudely dispelled by Miss Meiggs's immediate and decidedly personal attack. At least, he would have preferred to talk about other people, but he faced the music.

"Oh, I disapprove of them only for myself," he replied, "not for others."

"And why for yourself, particularly?"

The face of the Glee Club's comedian had assumed just the right seriousness.

"Because I'm more than susceptible and I don't want to run risks."

"Your time has come at last, then," put in his captor, Smith, with a gallant look at Miss Meiggs.

"Not at all," retorted Pellams, whose combative sense was less rusty than his skill in compliment. "If I'd been afraid of one exposure like this, do you think I'd have suggested being on deck to-night?"

Smith, with a fresh memory of their struggle, laughed at this blocking move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of late there had been a little rift in their sisterly love.

The older girl was not disconcerted. She had her estimate of Pellams Chase, and he was not disproving it. There were certain things she had long wanted the chance to say to him.

"I admire your self-restraint under temptation," she said; "it is characteristic of you in other circumstances, I believe"—this with discreet emphasis—"but, really, why should you dread letting this susceptibility get the better of you?"

Pellams caught the faint sneer in the words. He hoped that Mrs. Perkins had been talking just then to her Faculty partner. Increasing his affected earnestness, he replied:

"Because, when you get gone, it is bound to knock scholarship."

Here Smith giggled audibly, for Katharine and he were really feigning talk, being more entertained by the couple across the cloth. Katharine knew that by this last statement Pellams had sounded a dominant note in the soul of her opinionated sister. She was not surprised, then, when Miss Meiggs turned more fully toward the woman-hater.

"Tell me, are you one of these people who think co-education an evil?"

"I'm afraid I am." The speech gave Pellams a certain pleasure. There was nothing about this partner they had given him that tended toward converting him to the Chapter's point of view as to the advantage of girls at college.

"Of course," continued she, "I do not take your remark about scholarship as worthy of consideration in your case, because I am in one or two of your classes, when you attend them," and Pellams, listening, gave thanks that he and Professor Grind opposite had no such relation; "but monopolized time is really the cry of a good many who would wish to work, and it is all wrong. There is no reason why we should not come here and work with you, combining friendship and study. Our presence here is, in a way, preventive of many worse things."

Pellams turned his empty salad plate between his fingers.

"Well," he drawled, "I'm not sure I know what you mean by the worse things, and I've never been to another college, except Berkeley but I can't believe as much time is spent on them as some people here give to girls," this with a dreamy look over Smith's head; "the cigarette heart can't be much worse than what takes men out of college here, and if you refer to beer——"

"I do refer to beer," said Miss Meiggs, in an iced voice.

"Oh, no!" expostulated the Junior, spreading his hands, "they couldn't do it!" He looked at her frankly. "You get a head after too much beer," he went on, reckless as to pronouns and listening professors, "and you stay sober and work, for awhile, any way. In co-education you don't get any such call-down until the Committee meets."

"Don't let him tease you, Miss Meiggs," put in Mrs. Perkins, frowning mildly at Pellams because of Professor Grind's sphinx-like smile; "he's making it all up out of his inner consciousness, like the German philosopher and the—elephant, wasn't it, Professor Grind?"

"Yes?" answered Miss Meiggs, with a world of irony packed into the syllable; "your inner consciousness, then, Mr. Chase, proves rather forcibly that in one case the influence is against refinement, while in the case of co-education it is all for it. You will grant that, I think?"

Quite by accident, Pellams caught Miss Graham's eye. The twinkle there was a sort of glorified "sic 'im!"

"On the contrary," said he, perfectly composed, "I think it's the girl that's refined."

Miss Meiggs's "What!" was almost a shriek. Foo, the table-boy, brought her just then a plate of creamy rarebit. He had a jacket of luminous green silk, with the fraternity monogram in white, and he wore his cue hanging. But the fragrance of the rarebit and the splendor of Foo's toilet were alike lost upon the aroused Miss Meiggs. Such a statement, from this man of all others!

"You are judging us with yourself as a basis of contrast, I fancy!"

Not displeased at having put her in ill-humor, and refusing a gentle attempt on Mrs. Perkins' part to lead the conversation elsewhere, he went on with aggravated seriousness:

"But there is hope for me here, with the Faculty and with books"—he choked a little over this; "a man doesn't need to go through from one to eight love-affairs."

The champion of co-education sniffed.

"Nothing was further from my thoughts," said she. "The association of men and women in an atmosphere of study does not mean sentimentality. The relation should be normal and helpful, not spoiled by extremes." Katharine had heard these views before.

"But they can't dodge the extremes, you see," persisted Pellams. "It's the place here, the walks and drives in the country and all. Your theory might work all right at a city college or even at Berkeley, but on this campus, not so!"

"The reasoning of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature than boy-and-girl foolishness—unless one is idle. Where it results in that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"—with these words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in the country at the same time."

"But all the girls are not like you," began Pellams, and stopped at the sound of the words. They were not in the least intended to be taken as he felt that the table-full had taken them. Miss Meiggs put her fork viciously into the neglected rarebit. In the uncomfortable pause, Mrs. Perkins flutteringly passed her the cayenne pepper, but Miss Meiggs ignored the courtesy. She turned to Pellams.

"Even a love-affair," she snapped, "would benefit you more than the substitute you have chosen! You are a nice one to argue the refinement of the college girl! Are you refining yourself, your fraternity or your favorite side of the student-body by carousing at Mayfield and carrying the viciousness of that town to others where you may represent the University?"

"Oh, I say!" protested the Glee Club man, uneasily, for Grind was on the Committee; "don't be too hard on me."

"I'm sure you're unjust to Pellams," said the Chapter-mother, with a troubled look at her black lamb, who wondered what was coming: "I don't believe he——"

Miss Meiggs, peppering her rarebit deliberately, interrupted, with a little toss of the head.

"I will ask Mr. Chase one question then." She gathered some of the cheese upon her fork, and, balancing it midway to her mouth, went on with a gloating clearness of enunciation. "Please tell us why you came to the afternoon concert at the Chico Normal School this summer in a colored shirt and your dress suit, and why you did not sing your part of the program?"

"That's two questions," murmured Pellams. He could not look at Mrs. Perkins, to whom he had made certain solemn promises before that very trip; but his adversary had turned toward her with a look of righteous triumph. So deftly that even Pellams barely saw it, Katharine reached across him and peppered the forkful of rarebit just before the lips of Miss Meiggs closed over it. His answer was overlooked.

Mrs. Perkins took the sufferer up to her own room and Katharine vanished somewhere with Smith. When the tables were removed, a girl sat at the piano; her song finished, she struck briskly into the "Hot Time," and every one turned to Pellams. He sang the rag-time as though he were bursting with fun, while the Chapter sat before him, beaming its innocent gratitude. But the Glee Club man was singing to one guest alone, and he could not see her, or Smith either. When two songs had failed to bring her into view, he stole off upstairs unmolested and lay for some time with his door locked, grinning before sleep.

They hammered at his door next morning with appeals for his appearance at first-hour recitation, and fraternal reminders that he hadn't sufficient stand-in to cut. Foo went clanging the bell through the halls, dodging the shoes that flew at him through the door of a man who had nothing before the fourth hour, and the rush and hurry of late breakfast-time filled the house. But Pellams lay smoking in his narrow bed, engaged in the novel task of solving a point of etiquette. The affair of the night before was to be his final appearance in local society. His experience in small-talk with Miss Meiggs confirmed his decision to live a college life into which co-education did not enter outside his class-rooms. Yet, having once departed from the mode of such a life, he found himself under an obligation. A co-ed had found him in trouble and had done the "white" thing by him at a critical moment; even Jimmy Mason, over at the Hall, could not have stood by him any better. In an obligation to Jimmy there was no problem—only the matter of time to do his part—but with a co-ed, Pellams felt that it was different. She was not a feature of his life. To the woman-hater's mind, if a man has become indebted to a girl, honor bids him pay the debt, the sooner the better. He need never see the girl again, once the score is even. This philosophy evolved, it took another cigarette to decide just how the balance could be struck, and then Pellams went downstairs to wheedle a remnant of breakfast from the indulgent Foo.

Applied to the new element into which he had ventured, something of the keen observation which the Junior devoted to football practice might have made the payment of his debt to Katharine Graham a transaction of less public note. He would have waited, probably, with the brazenness that characterizes local courtship, at the door of the library and caught her as she emerged. Or he would have learned what mails she usually waited for at the post-office and would have lingered until she had opened her box and had started back toward the Quad pretending to look over her correspondence. Or else he would have watched her classes and happened along by accident just as she was coming out for a vacant hour. But these established forms had escaped his notice. Instead, he did what he considered the "proper," and drove dashingly up to Roble in Paulsen's best single rig and his own new fall suit.

Roble caught sight of him beyond the flower beds, over the heads of the tall pampas. The news electrified the dormitory. A Freshman stopped her experimental lab-work with the piano, and joined the others behind the lace at the parlor windows. A group of girls, chatting on the yellow railing of the steps, watched the approach of the apparition. Pellams Chase coming to Roble! Not since the morning Mt. Hamilton was covered with snow had there been such a phenomenon.

"I believe he's coming to take Florence to drive!" said a mischievous Theta Gamma, looking toward Miss Meiggs, who sat frowning at the approaching buggy.

"He ought to," laughed Katharine Graham's roommate, "for not telling her how much red pepper she had put on her rarebit while she was absorbed in talking to him!"

"If he's coming for me," said the Senior grimly, "I shall not disappoint him."

"What!" cried Katharine; "you wouldn't go with him, Florence! Why, we none of us met him until last night."

"Last night I was unfortunately absent-minded," answered Miss Meiggs, "and I did not say all I wanted to. It wouldn't be a pleasant drive!"

"He would have you at his mercy—you shan't go!" laughed another girl, "it would be flying in the face of Providence as well as of Propriety!"

"I can't imagine whom he's coming for," said Katharine, who was sure that he was coming for her. She thought out the severe little refusal she should make him when he had drawn her aside.

The stranger scraped his buggy wheels delicately along the curbing of the Roble walk. The group of girls on the steps was an unexpected ordeal. He caught sight of the amused faces behind the curtains above him and almost lost his nerve.

"Rubber!" he growled. He had made many a clever entrance in the student theatricals, but to-day in climbing out of the buggy he got badly tangled in the reins. In spite of his desperate will, his face was growing red. With painfully fixed gaze he came up the steps toward the Theta Gammas; standing uneasily before them, he blurted out, with no preliminaries whatever:

"Miss Graham, would you like to go driving?"

Katharine straightened and looked at him coolly. One of the girls gave a little gasp at his impertinence.

"It isn't customary, I believe," said Katharine, "to ask to go driving with a girl you have met once, at a supper."

"Isn't it?" faltered Pellams. There was not a vestige of his usual bravado about him. Katharine met his honest gaze, hesitated, then said:

"But I shall be delighted to go, just the same. Will you come in and wait till I get my things?"

They curved round the Dormitory lawn and away toward the La Honda redwoods, leaving the astounded young women on the porch to discuss, as women sometimes do, the peculiar behavior of their departed sister.

She explained it to Pellams during the drive. To his surprise, he learned that he had been hopelessly ill-bred to ask her at all; that had the invitation not been given before the other girls he should have driven away alone. As it was, she was in for no end of criticism. She discouraged any conversation upon the subject of cayenne pepper. Furthermore, she declared herself in full accord with Florence Meiggs as regarded love affairs; she believed in them as little as her elder sister; good-fellowship, without sentiment, was possible and quite sufficient. Pellams, having resolved upon the utmost good-nature during the drive, put the pride of the livery stable through her best paces and allowed his companion to declare her views unquestioned. Toward the end of the afternoon, he deposited her at the Roble door with a pleasant feeling that he had done his duty and was through with co-eds forever.

A wild uproar filled the Rho dining-room when the gallant came in to dinner, late. With an exasperating readiness of conclusion, the crowd congratulated him upon his change of heart, they welcomed to their ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own: