"Because that's what I did last time, and it won't work any more." The poor girl's teeth were chattering with her fright. She laughed at herself in an hysterical way, and wrung her hands, as if with cold, and dropped back into the broadest kind of dialect. "Oh, I feel 'sif my stomach was all gone." Nettie Russell regarded it all as merely another disagreeable duty to be shirked. Nothing troubled her very much. "You just wait and see how I get out of it," she said, as she passed by. At two o'clock the principal came in, and removed even the small pulpit, so that nothing should stand between the shrinking young orators and the keen derisive eyes below. The chapel was a very imposing structure to Bradley. It was square and papered in grey-white with fluted columns of the Corinthian order of architecture, and that touch of history and romance did not fail of its effect on the country boys fresh from the barn-yard and the corn-rows. It added to their fear and self-abasement, as they rolled their slow eyes around and upward. The audience consisted mainly of the pupils arranged according to classes, the girls on the left and the boys on the right. In addition, some of the towns-people, who loved oratory, or were specially interested in the speakers of the day, were often present to add to the terror of the occasion. Radbourn came in with Lily Graham, talking earnestly. He was in the same section with Bradley, a fact which did not cheer Bradley at all. Jack Carver came in with a jaunty air. His cuffs and collar were linen, and his trousers were tailor-made, which was distinction enough for him. He had no scruples, therefore, in shirking the speaking with the same indifference Nettie Russell showed. Milton, who came in the first section, was joking the rest upon their nervousness. "Say, when did you eat y'r last meal?" he whispered to Bradley. "Yesterday morning," Bradley replied, unable to smile. All the week the members of the last section had been prancing up and down the various rooms in boarding-houses, to the deep disgust of their fellow students, who mixed harsh comments throughout their practice, as they shouted in thunder tones: "I came not here to talk. ('Then why don't you shut up?') You know too well the story of our thraldom. ('You bet we do, we've heard it all the week.') The beams of the setting sun fall upon a slave. ('Would a beam of some sort would fall on you.') O Rome! Rome!"--('Oh, go roam the wild wood.') All the week the boarding-house mistresses had pounded on the stove-pipe to bring the appeal of "Spartacus to the Romans" down to a key that would not also include all the people in the block. All to no purpose. Spartacus was aroused, and nothing but a glaive or a battle-axe could bring him to silence and submission. The first section now sat smiling grimly. Their revenge was coming. After the choir had sung, the principal of oratory, note-book in hand, came down among the pupils, and began the fateful roll-call.