"Maybe it's only in a few places, and we can scrape it off," suggested Will Foster, a chum of Gerhart. "Let's try." He endeavored, with his knife, to remove some of the sticky stuff, but he might as well have tried to dig up a board in the floor. "What is it?" asked Gerhart's partner. "I don't know," he answered ruefully. "Something very sticky has gotten on the floor." "Maybe some of the waiters spilled ice cream or coffee, or some candy got there," she suggested. "This is stickier than any of those things," spoke Gerhart. "I--I guess some one has played a trick on us." "A trick?" "Yes; the sophomores. I should have been more on the lookout, but I didn't think they could get in. I told the men at the door not to let any one in who didn't have a freshman pin. But--well, we'll wait a bit and see if it dries up," he concluded. But the stuff on the floor didn't dry up. Instead, it became more sticky. The ballroom was like one big sheet of adhesive flypaper, and the dancers, walking about, felt their shoes pull up with queer little noises every time they took a step. They tried to dance once more, but it was a miserable failure. One might as well have tried to waltz or two-step on the sands of the seashore. Then from a window there sounded the old song: "Clarence McFadden, He Wanted to Waltz." The chagrined dancers turned to the casement, to behold a circle of mocking faces. Gerhart looked, too. [Illustration: "Clarence McFadden, He Wanted to Waltz"] "The sophs!" he cried, as he caught sight of Tom, Phil, Sid, Dutch Housenlager and several others. "At your service!" cried Phil. "Guess you'll have to dance to slow music to-night!" And then, to show that it was in revenge for the fire scare, the sophomores sang: "Scotland's Burning." "It worked to perfection, Dutch. However did you manage it?" asked Tom, as the sophomores, having satisfied themselves that the freshman dance had been spoiled, walked back to college. "Easy," answered the fun-loving student. "I mixed up a sticky preparation of glue, varnish, gum and so on, made it into a powder, and put it in alcohol. Then I sneaked in past the doorkeeper I had bribed, and sprinkled the stuff all over the floor. There was no color to it, and they didn't notice it. The alcohol kept it from sticking until after the march, and then, when the alcohol evaporated, it left the gum ready to do its work." "And it did it," commented Sid. It certainly did, for the disconcerted freshman and the pretty girls soon left the hall. It was impossible to dance on the floor until the sticky stuff had been scraped off. "It was rather a brutal trick, after all," said Tom to Phil a little later, when the three were in their room. "It would have been all right on the freshies alone, but the girls--they had to suffer, too." "Of course," said Sid. "Why not? _Secundum naturam_, you know, according to the course of nature it had to be. The good with the bad. The freshies brought it on themselves, eh, Phil?"