"I numbered them off as they voted, and I could see that things were going darkly and suspiciously for our friend the Lobster. 'What do you think of it?' says Pellams. He was getting excited. 'We didn't know our power, did we? Look at the votes he's rolling up. Say, we're corkers and never knew it!' A few classes from the respectable part of the Quad, where they do Political Science, came drifting along then with votes for Castleton, and it went Castleton for awhile; then a lull during class, followed by a scattering vote for Boggs. It was about an even thing during eleven-thirty break, with Castleton still ahead. The frat votes fell in bunches in the biggest rush at noon; I could catch old Boggsie's name marked on most of them, but Castleton was full fifty to the good then. I bolted lunch with Pellams at his house and came back to the Quad. Things were beginning to happen. People I never heard of, the kind of bird that floats in and out on the train and probably doesn't know there is a Student-Body with troubles of its own; digs, crawling out into the light, blinking away at the line; Laboratory fiends in squads, actually losing twenty minutes of precious credit,—the darndest crowd of resurrected stiffs the Quad ever saw, strung out from the registrar's office to the polls, every last one of them squeezing a ballot properly marked ahead, all looking as if it were a conferring of degrees, serious as hell, you know, and the eye of the Brown girl or of one of her crowd fastened on each of them. Poor Castleton, he was a goner! His heelers got up against this line of sphinxes and fell back, done up. It was two o'clock and after; still the vote rolled up. At two-thirty they closed shop, and Pellams and I fell on each other's chests behind a pillar, and busted at the josh on ourselves.

"Then we went over to get the figures of our triumph. 'Boggs, 402; Castleton, 375,' and the biggest vote in the history of the office. Well, you bet we went down to the train! Couldn't freeze us out! We were going to pry open the Lobster's claws and use them for a corkscrew. So we piled into a 'bus. But, honest, we were paralyzed.

"Down at the station was the conquering Brown with her people, all watching for the train. Say, when Boggsie saw the whole gang of us, he was a balloon. He got up on a truck and made us a speech of thanks. Pellams and I yelled 'Hear, Hear,' right along. Oh, it was awful! He gave us the whole history of the Student-Body from the days of 'Ninety-one up. Finally Pellams couldn't stand it any longer and called out, 'Good boy, Boggsie. How about that feed?' and Boggsie waved his hand like a Tuesday evening spieler and said, 'I have provided for that, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Brown, my cousin, invites you all down to her home in Palo Alto for a little refreshment. Everyone is welcome.'

"I had to pick my fat friend up. Boggsie's getting out of the whole thing without spending a bean knocked him cold. But he got his wind later. You ought to have heard his speech down there at the house, with a plate of melted strawberry muck in one hand and a glass of sour in the other, replying to Boggsie's vote of thanks to us two, and skinning his face at the Brown girl. Oh, it was a peach!"

IN THE DARK DAYS.

In the Dark Days.

Such a day as this should bring Craig into the pastures. He could lean on the fence and pull at his pipe to his heart's content. The brood-mare did not fancy the smoke, but she liked to have him talk to her. There were a number of interests they had in common; the smell of the new grass, the tempting silver-green of willows budding along the lake beyond the fence, delighted him, too, while Bonita herself was deeply interested in his University.

She could remember perfectly the days when the ranch spread undisturbed from her paddock in the stockfarm yard to the deep shadows of the Arboretum. Then she was only a colt, to be sure; but the world beyond the paddock fence interested her. The grooms in the yard were not more sorry than she herself that the last colt from a famous sire should be a filly with an imperfect ankle-joint. When they took the other colts out of the paddock to put them through their morning lessons around the little ring in the kindergarten, she wished mightily to follow. She turned about the corral at a good speed to show them that she had the proper spirit of her blood, but they always shut the red gate too soon and the others went on up the road impudently flicking their fuzzy tails at her.

A gray-bearded man with kindly eyes, whom they called the "Governor," used to drive up under the blossoming eucalyptus trees every now and then; he stopped one day by her paddock and came to look at her. Bonita liked him at once, and she paid him the most delicate attention she knew by trying to eat his clothes. The Governor laughed as he put her off, and said that it was too bad about her ankle. Then he drove over to watch the kindergarten learn the alphabet of race-winning.

Later, she watched her fellows go lightly down the road to the stock car and rumble away over the track to the main line and on to the great world where men put trust in them and sent them back to the Farm with newspaper clippings and horseshoe wreaths made of immortelles with the figure 2-and-a-fraction in the middle.

When she was grown and they had put her out in a side pasture, there were some new stables there, with a lot of men thronging round them who did not look like grooms. The knowledge that something of importance to the world was about to happen the other side of the fence made her feel more contented. If she could not travel in a box car to see such things, it was good to have some of the excitement of it brought in to the ranch.

At first she did not notice much, being deeply interested just then in the early education of Fenelon, 2.10-1/4, who was a fretful infant and took up most of her time. When he had passed out of her immediate care and was cropping sweet alfalfa with the rest, she watched curiously the foundations sinking into the grass, the crowd of people who came one May morning to hear things said round a block of yellow sandstone, the fitting of the red tiling above the stone walls. By this time she knew the reason of it all; the dead heir, the monument, the boys and girls who were coming to be taught in this great kindergarten. Finally, when these had poured into the place, some of them straggled out into the pasture and made friends with her. From them she learned more definitely the great things that had been done and were about to happen; they told her of the wonderful endowment, of the strangers from corners of the world never reached even by the lucky horses who had rolled away in the box cars, of the numberless buildings that were to surround and dwarf the structures she had seen grow up in the sun.

"The Governor" had driven less often through the yard since the yellow buildings were up, and the boys and girls playing among them. After awhile he ceased to come altogether. Then Bonita, the brood-mare, understood that something had happened. It was more quiet everywhere after this. Most of the horses and mares, her colts among them, went off in the cars, not to come back, they told her. She stood under the dark oaks for hours at a time, fearing lest they would send her, too. Her longing for the world was past now; she wished to be left in the quiet pastures with the students to talk to.

It was during these days that Craig, who taught something to the younger people, used to lean on the fence and smoke during the afternoons. He was not much older than many of the students she knew, and she liked him particularly. He had lumps of something white and sweet, and he rubbed her head in exactly the right spot. When she had won his confidence, he told her many things about himself and the College. Once he had been at another place, a college older than this by a long time but not so famous. The Overseer of this one had written him to come and teach there, at a better salary. He explained to her what this meant—money for the support of his mother, and in a few years the study in Europe of which he dreamed, and for which he worked and saved, and beside this the growing up with a new university, from an instructorship in the present to a full professorship in the wonderful future. He told her what was promised him, and showed her a picture once of the plan of the completed university, with its arch and chapel tower and the great mechanical shops spreading back across her shady pasture to the borders of the lake.

Then she learned what the death of "the Governor" had brought upon them; why the horses had been sold and why there were no more hammers nor chisels ringing against the stone. The farm was losing a thousand dollars a day, and the Government had seized upon the money they were building the monument with and was trying to wrest it entirely from the woman who had stopped once to pet the brood-mare when "the Governor" was driving in the yard. These things were hard to understand. There had never been any question of money here that Bonita could remember.

One day she had nosed vainly for the sugar he used to bring; Craig told her that for two months he had had no money to give his mother; that if it wasn't for a grocer in Mayfield who was kind to people in trouble, they would have had nothing to eat. Bonita, remembering the students she had seen gathering mushrooms, suggested grass; but he told her, laughing, that only one man to his knowledge had ever lived that way and he was a king, long ago, in the holy times. He, Craig, would have to have money. In an old vest he had worn in the East, his mother found a few pennies and had walked to Palo Alto and spent them for stamps for the sake of paying for something. After this explanation, Bonita did not hunt for sugar.

Although things grew easier after a time, Craig was gloomy enough during the afternoons when they talked across the fence. Once "the Governor's Wife" had been given five hundred dollars to pay her servants, and she had given it to the Overseer for his teachers. But the Overseer had begun at the houses where there were the most children, and he had not got around to Craig, who had only a mother. When temptation came to him, he told Bonita about it and asked her advice. A letter had come to him with an offer from his old college; it meant a full salary and the hope of Europe. It was everything to him, he said, but he couldn't bear to go away. The brood-mare had put her nose affectionately against his arm. She understood little about the salary, but she knew how dreadful it would be to leave the pasture. The man must have understood, for after being quiet a long time and smoking harder than ever, he said that he was going to stay. But many times after that, when other offers came, he told her how hard it was to decide and how black everything looked for the University. The Government was pulling at the fund, and the lady who was building the monument was going to sell her precious things to get money.

The last time Craig leaned on the fence and whistled to her, he had been very unhappy. Since then Bonita had not seen him. She was afraid that he, too, had gone, after all, as the horses and grooms had gone, without even a good-bye. She felt that if he had finally decided to give it up, the smoke must fade away above the top of the chimney and the voices cease altogether.

But to-day, when the clouds were breaking and the clear blue of summer-time looked down between them, the chimney-smoke was blacker than ever and across by the lake fence some young people were pulling mushrooms and laughing. Bonita looked over toward the buildings. Then she cropped grass again, for only a gurgling meadow-lark broke the line of the fence-rail.

Suddenly she heard Craig's low whistle. He had come out from the Wood-shop and put his elbows on the fence, his pipe sending up clear, white smoke. Stopping now and then for a blade of grass, to show that she was not too eager, the brood-mare walked slowly up to him. He was not happy, as she had expected to find him. His brow was puckered and his lips shut tightly on the stem of his pipe. Bonita put her nose over the fence. The instructor took his pipe from his mouth and rubbed her cheek slowly with the back of his knuckles.

"Well, old girl," he said, "I'm afraid you and I won't have many more talks over this fence."

The brood-mare looked at him with questioning eyes.

"I plead guilty," he went on, "I oughtn't to have kept the secret from you, I know. The minute I got the letter I should have come out to tell you about it, but it was raining; honestly, it was."

He gave her a lump of sugar by way of conciliation.

"You see, I couldn't resist this one," he continued, while the sugar crunched under her teeth; "it's a big honor and three thousand a year, and I've got to do something; now, haven't I?"

His tone was doubtful, as though he were hardly sure of her opinion. The meadow-lark which he had disturbed was releasing the joy of its full throat under a shaft of sunlight further down the fence. The air hung over them, sweet with the fragrance of the freshened pasture, charged with the mysterious power of a Santa Clara Spring. No man, or horse, who has caught that smell, ever forgets the valley of the Saint. Bonita was looking across the green to the mushroom gatherers.

Craig spoke, a little petulantly.

"You never agree with me about my going, anyway. You seem to think that the beauty of this campus and the freedom of everything here is argument enough. But it's all too uncertain. I've told you that my salary is cut away down and I'm not any too sure of ever having it made up to me; as it is, we assistants are here only because the heads decided to cut their own pay and keep us for the sake of the departments. If the suit is lost, it's good-bye, anyway. I can't believe you have much idea that we're going to win it to-morrow. It went for us in the lower courts, here in California, but do you think that the Supreme Court of these selfish and United States is going to decide for us just because they were gallant enough to Mrs. Stanford to hurry the case up in the calendar and cut short her suspense? You don't understand things, if you think so. Out here where you live, the rains may be late and the grass seem never coming, but you know it'll rain sooner or later, and you're getting hay right along and it doesn't take much water to bring up what you want. But with me it's different. We're going to get a weather prediction from Washington to-morrow that'll tell us definitely whether it's to be winter for keeps around here or summer and a good crop."

The instructor leaned on the fence and puffed on at his pipe. Bonita endured the smoke that clung around them in the still air, for she felt that they were at a crisis. She drew up closer to the rails and put her head against the instructor's shoulder. Suddenly, the man let his pipe fall into the grass and he laid his face against her soft, gray nose.

"You're a good old girl," he said, "and you know more about it than anyone. But you haven't any money question to worry you. You don't love the place a bit more than I do; you don't love it as much, because you only know the nature side of it, and I know the bigness of the rest of it, too. But the hope's almost dead, old lady; I can't tie my ambitions to a corpse, you wouldn't ask me to, and you know I'm not the only one to be looked after. But, oh, it'll be hard to go, won't it! There's something that grips you where you live—you understand it."

The brood-mare did not pull away, although he was holding her head tightly in his hot hands.

"If it all goes smash to-morrow and I can ever raise the money, I'm going to send back for you, my beauty. You're getting too old to bring much now, and you'll have to go sure if the Government wins."

Bonita lifted her head suddenly. A drop of cold rain had fallen against her face. The clouds had drawn together sulkily above them. Across the intervening turf hastened the mushroom gatherers, their baskets full of the brown and white trophies. Craig picked up his pipe.

"Good-bye," he said, with a caress. "I'll come over to-morrow and tell you the final news."

Bonita had never shown him how much she really cared, true to her feminine reserve; but to-day, leaning her slender neck far over the fence, she whinnied after him until he stopped at the corner of the Power-house and waved back to her. Then she cropped grass slowly while it began to sprinkle.

Next morning, when the second hour was about half through, a feeling of excitement filled the Quad and penetrated the classrooms. Craig's students were not paying very creditable attention to his lecture. He himself was keeping his mind on the syllabus with considerable difficulty. When someone passed the window and the eyes of the entire class, including even the enthusiastic dig on the front seat, were turned that way, Craig let his own wander and hesitated the least bit in his talk.

All at once, like a thunderclap, a half-dozen voices somewhere in the Quad gave the yell. Craig stopped speaking and looked at the class, who gazed back at him. A man with his back to the windows stood up and looked out. The seats creaked ominously. Then, like grass after a breeze, the whole class rose and craned necks at the window.

The instructor, coming to himself, began feebly:

"If you please—"

Again the yell, not the desperate cry that is wrung out to cheer a losing team, but the voice of victory, of joy and of great relief.

Professor Craig went out of his classroom like a shot, the class after him.

There was a triumphal parade to the station, with flags and the entire population of Roble beating time with dust-pans and brooms, to meet the President who had sent the happy telegram. There were songs and speeches and demonstrations in front of Xasmin House, with fellows hugging each other or swinging round in side-line fashion, girls crying, and the President's parrot incidentally learning the yell. Then, at night, the alumni poured in on the trains from north and south, stirring the tumult anew. Gay lanterns jewelled the porches of the Row, the Gym blazed with light for more speeches and football songs, with no thought of football in the singing of them, and round and round the shadowy Quad, where the yell flashed in electric letters, went a wild carnival procession of men and women, with torches and noise-machines, and Instructor Craig at their head.

The gleam of the unusual lights, the happy shouts, and the clamor of firecrackers, came in mingled confusion across to the dark pasture where Bonita stood by the fence with her head raised and her pointed ears forward. Craig had not come that afternoon to tell her the final truth; but, listening and watching from the shadow, she did not feel that he had gone away.

When she did see him again, he wore a new suit and, what was more important, its pockets bulged with sugar. She was very glad to see him, of course, but her greeting was an indifferent one after all; for she was preoccupied, just then, with the infant needs of Pronto 2:17 ¾, and could not stop to interest herself in the fact that the youngest of the universities had been saved for all time.

CROSSROADS.

Crossroads.

The regular after-dinner crowd was smoking in Frank Lyman's Encina boudoir, lolling over his sofa, their feet on his table, their legs tangled on his iron bedstead. The steam heat was coming "Clank! clank!" into the radiators, for it was a cold, clear evening in the time between rains. Outside the fog was thick upon the hills, sending gray ghost-fingers over toward the valley. You could lean from the window and smell its clean moisture, mingling with the scent of young plants in the fresh-turned earth. Frank himself sat close to the window and looked out toward the gymnasium, because he had discovered a new amusement. There was a section of the board walk between Encina and the gym which was flooded just to its top by a pool from the late rain, so that if you stepped heavily thereon the plank gave a bit and dropped you into the water. The diversion consisted in betting with "Pegasus" Langdon on the style of crossing adopted by chance wayfarers. The stakes were five cents a corner. Frank backed the class who took the thing at one bound; "Peg" laid his coin on those who went over on their tiptoes, trying not to spring the plank into the water. For every one who did neither, but walked around the puddle, five cents a corner went into the tobacco fund. It was just as good as matching nickels and involved less exertion.

There is a theory in the Hall that you can tell a man's habits by the rooms he occupies there. The nearer he gets to the corner fronting on the baseball field, the more sociable is his nature. Those who hold the rooms at that corner or on the second or third floors, so as to be in easy hail of anyone coming in at the back entrance, are Public Characters. Their apartments are reception rooms in very truth. It has never been explained why Encina does not sag at that end, like an excursion steamer on the side toward a boat race. If, on the other hand, you believe you have a Mission, or if you are a Dig, rooming in the Hall because it is convenient to the Quad, then you dwell in "Faculty Row," away off to the east, where the early sun pulls you out in time to put the finishing touches to your Latin, and where there is no trafficking to and from the Quad to disturb your evening study.

It was said that Frank Lyman was the only man at the Quadrangle end of the Hall who ever made much pretense of studying. By the same token the keepers of the college tradition alleged that he alone of all the gang stood high in the opinion of the Faculty. It was a way he had. He stood well with everybody.

If they had taken the trouble to investigate, those who wondered at his ability both to loaf much and to study much, at his scholarship dwelling alongside of his popularity, they might have found that he kept the two things in harmony by a marvelous system. The gang dwelt in his room, made it their hang-out, but only just so long; when the hour arrived for Lyman's study-time, they vanished away mysteriously, took the hint conveyed in some fashion, no one ever knew how, and were gone.

To the under-classmen, Lyman was an object of healthy awe. Older than the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way, though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the Sequoia editor, would have told you that he thought more of Lyman than of any two men in the class; it is a question, though, whether he would have recommended Lyman's advice in everything. Frank was a good man to keep a Freshman's money for him, to listen to his class-room troubles or to stand between the luckless youngster and Faculty wrath; but when it was a case into which something deeper entered, perhaps the Senior's worldly philosophy was not of the best sort. This was the idea of dreamers like "Pegasus" Langdon, who said things about "sentiment" and to whom Freshmen seldom came for advice. But Lyman continued to hold his after-dinner receptions, and his admirers piled themselves comfortably on his bed and believed in him implicitly.

The psychological moment came for the regular withdrawal. Frank opened his windows with care, donned the old bath-robe which was his armor for the battle intellectual, put on his eye-shade over his straight brown hair, and opened his Pollock. At this hint the others slipped out; only Jimmie Mason lingered, his gaze on the shadowy hills with their faint fringe of dark green, the dregs of his pipe purring in the stillness. Lyman's room-mate was somewhere queening. Lyman himself, pretending to study, looked up from time to time, waiting for the Sophomore to unbosom himself. Frank knew the symptoms.

"Well, Jimmie?" he said at length—one couldn't study with that going on and Frank had his stint to finish.

"It's about my father."

"Drinking again?"

Jimmie only nodded. The smoke went out in his pipe; he knocked the ashes from it and put it away mechanically in the common pipe-rack over the radiator.

"Tell me about it." Frank had closed his book, and was leaning back in his tilted chair, his feet braced in the shelf beneath, his hands clasped over his knees.

"Not much to tell, I guess, no more than you know already. I got a letter from the old lady."

"Your grandmother, eh?"

"Yes. She says something must be done. 'In low saloons,' she says, and I've been sizing it up—and Frank, don't you think I ought to go home?"

A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table between them.

It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.

"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?"

"Not much. We've always been poor, you know."

"Because he drank?"

"Yes, he never could keep a job but so long."

"Not even when you were small?"

"I wasn't with him then. When my mother got—when she left him, she took me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I lived with him until I came here."

"Are you very fond of him?"

"No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or for me, to make me."

"I don't see why you lived with him then."

"He'd behave himself better. I had a sort of influence over him. He was afraid of me, or ashamed, or something, and I stuck to him to keep him straight. But, oh! I hated it, and when he got going all right, I cut loose and came here."

"What sort is the old lady? W. C. T. U. and all that kind of thing, I suppose?"

"Something on that order."

The Oracle leaned forward until his chest came almost between his bent knees, as was his wont when he clinched his arguments.

"I suppose you've never figured it out that people of her way of thinking would call what little drinking you do at Mayfield 'drinking in low saloons?'"

By his silence Jimmie admitted that there was something in the position. Frank followed up his lead.

"So it may be nothing very bad after all. But let's suppose it is; suppose he has slid back into the worst of his old ways, is it going to pay to go on and break things all up for yourself, for the purpose of trying to bolster him up? It seems to me you would let your enthusiasm get away with your common sense. But it's your business, Jimmie. Only the thing that gets me is the blooming uselessness of it all. What can you do?"

"I can work."

"You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't you?"

"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.

"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I don't understand."

"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample, when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.

"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait. You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long, and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be sense in it; there isn't now.—"

Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his thoughts on his unfinished work, said:

"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.

The fog had not yet come into the valley when the Sophomore opened the window, down in his own room; it was reaching out, still driven before a lazy wind. Indistinctly the singing of the Glee Club, rolling home from practice in the Quad, came through the damp twilight. Jimmie had been with them on the Christmas trip, tasting a social life he had known nothing of till then. Now they were going to run him for leader next year. He sat on his window ledge listening. The side of the Hall stretched away from him, four tiers of light where the fellows were at work or were bumming away the week-night. Through the opened windows came the low tone of many conversations, stirred now and then by a "rough-house" note. A coyote barked somewhere among the hills, a reminder of the nearness of our higher life to the life universal. Jimmie took a long, deep breath of the moist air, as though he would draw it all, all unto himself. This was his life, he had made it for himself, and he loved it, he loved it! He had no part any longer with what had come before it. All these were in shadow, the people and things of his bitter childhood. The fellows up there in the lighted rooms had homes somewhere; there was a feed-box being opened even then, perhaps, at some study table; they were thinking of vacation, most of them, and of other places. But this was home to Mason, this wide, soft campus, with the sandstone arching over it and bounded by shaggy hills, the only place he could call his own. Most of the laughing people who lived here with him were in a dream from which some Commencement Day would wake them. To Mason it was reality. Yes, Frank Lyman was right. Jimmie was glad he had asked him. The idea of going away had been a thoughtless impulse, an immature judgment. He would stay—for the two years.

He took off his coat and opened a book under the lamp; but a face came and settled between him and the page, a bloated face with irresolute lips that would not move from the black and white before him, but flickered there and mocked him, until finally he closed the book, and, without looking out again on the campus, turned into bed.

II.

It was a quiet night outside. The last spring rain was over; the dry, deadening California summer had begun its advance on the land. Already, the green of the hills had faded into a lighter hue, a forerunner of a yellow June and a brown July. The campus was astir with the movement of a Friday night. Shadowy figures, in couples, came and passed down the fairy-land vistas of the Quadrangle; the 'busses deposited the élite of Palo Alto at the door of the Alpha Nus who had said that they would be at home; noises of all kinds, from not unmusical singing to plainly unmusical whoops, exhaled from every pore of the Hall. The piano on the lobby was groaning out a waltz from its few attuned keys and the little space between the big rug and the rail overlooking the dining-room was packed with forms in various conditions of negligée, dancing earnestly and painfully.

Only one room, and that generally the center of disturbance, "sported the oak." Jimmie Mason sat in the knockery, with a book cocked up in front of him, and made a pretense of studying, but his thoughts wandered. Finally he threw his work aside altogether, and looked at the little patches of starlight visible between the branches of the tree outside. It was so plain, the thing he ought to do, in justice to himself, that he had thought the dream of the other thing a fancy that had passed and had been put away with the notions of his prep-days. And yet he had found no peace in his new decision. His plans for next year, his work in class, his new success with certain ventures which after two years of the hardest, closest pinching, had put within his reach the means to gratify a few little whims, to indulge in a few things his poverty had hitherto forbidden him—a few common things the men around him enjoyed, and the lack of which he had ever concealed even from himself—all these were made footless by the ache in the bottom of his soul. And, as he sat and pondered on it, a hard, dull resentment which he had hitherto kept down by sheer will power rose above his other thoughts and claimed admission as a reality. His father had no right to do this thing to him. He was an old man; his chance was past, given up for a few barrels, more or less, of distilled spirits. It was for this that the something inside was asking him to forfeit the chance he had made for himself. The University was his home. His father had done nothing toward this. The laundry agency had provided a living, and the broad democracy of the college had done the rest for him. He was one of the "prominent men" now, a somebody, as he had never been and never could be in the travesty of home that had been his father's giving. Upon his life here rested the possibilities of the future toward which he looked dreamingly sometimes when his notes were written up, and the laundry accounts checked. Assuredly, his father had no claim on this; to admit it would be an injustice to himself, to his ambition, and to his work. And yet this face which had come between him and his book the first night the fight had been on must haunt him always in the hour when his tide was turning.

A thump on the window which opened on the front piazza recalled him from his reverie. A dozen feet were shuffling on the stones outside, and a ruddy face glowed over the sash.

"Go away, Pellams. Got to plug," said Jimmie, hastily resuming his book.

"Relate your predicaments to a constable," said Pellams. "There's going to be a Thirsting Bee at the——"

"Can't go. Got to work on my thesis."

"Relate that to your Uncle Adderclaws. Tumble out, now."

Jimmie only shook his head. There was a conference outside in whispers; then the gang withdrew with suspicious alacrity. Two minutes later, the lock grated with the cautious insertion of a key, and the mob rushed in; Jimmie had forgotten the passkey, for whose possession Pellams had held up the Jap.

"Ah, say, get out of here, you fellows. I'm digging."

"I know it. And you're going to stop. Gentlemen adventurers"—here Pellams mounted a chair—"James Mason, our small but thirsty friend, has sourball. Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what is the universal cure for his affliction?"

"Beer!" The unanimity of the response would have done credit to a Roman mob.

"Quite right ye are, my merry retainers. And will ye, in loving kindness to him, apply that remedy?"

"We will! We will!"

"Well said, me liegemen. Jimmie, move along!" and Pellams fell to strolling around the room and criticizing its collection of stolen signs with the air of one who has discharged his business and stands at ease. The rest threw themselves on the man with sourball and were for tearing off his outer garments and forcing on his sweater, but Lyman by some occult means of his own got the boy aside. One never knew how Frank managed the gang; it was always that way; his methods never obtruded themselves, all one saw was results.

"I wouldn't if I were you," said he; "they won't understand it, and it doesn't do you any good—this sort of thing. Better jolly up."

The Sophomore did not speak; he only shook his head.

"I know what you're holding back for," went on the other; "but going down there isn't the same sort of thing; really, it isn't."

Jimmie started a little, inside, as he realized for the first time the base of his aversion to dragging himself out on the trip. He turned, half-mechanically, and began tugging at his collar. That Phantom should never come between him and one single thing he wanted to do. It might embitter it all, but it could never prevent him from the outward act. He threw his tie over a chair and took off his coat with unnecessary emphasis in the movement. Ten minutes later he was treading the primrose path of dalliance with an arm around "Nosey" Marion.

There was a cool breeze off the bay, bringing the scent of salt water along with the odor of spruce-trees. A voice from the upper regions of the Hall called out to the cavalcade, crawling through the half-darkness along the road:

"He-ea, you! Bring some back for me!"

A dozen windows slammed open at that, and twenty throats took up the noise. Pellams was for answering, but Lyman discreetly checked him.

Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his hat to the cool air.

"This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!"

"Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the muse!"

The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased.

"That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield—just to be original."

"And you'll kill the traffic."

"Chain the poet!"

"If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent."

These from half-a-dozen voices at once.

"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield—just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back."

"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight."

"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew.

"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"

Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! A bas Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long,