Afterward, when recollection of that vivid, scarlet instant returned to him, he was never quite able to explain to himself how it had happened. Perhaps he did not reckon with his various courses in physics--certain laws of falling bodies, accelerated motion, and such uninteresting things. In any event it was as though his hands had not been there; for before he could clutch at the little furry ball of falling femininity it had shot between those groping hands of his and in an infinitesimal space of time had struck the low snow-drift beside the walk, no longer a furry ball but a sprawl of screaming child. "Oh! Mr. Catherwood!" cried Mrs. Lowe. There was an instant's silence and then the atmosphere was punctured by the piercing yelps of the little Mary. Mrs. Lowe snatched her daughter from the drift and, clutching her close, cooed to her, consolingly. "Did the great horrid man drop mother's darling?" she murmured. Catherwood, stricken momentarily dumb by the accident, finally found his voice though it was unsteady and very much in his throat. "Mrs. Lowe," he exclaimed, despairingly, "I'm very sorry; believe me; I guess, I must----" She shot him one glance of injured motherhood, and without replying turned and strode out of the yard still hugging close to her maternal bosom the wailing Mary. The shrieks had penetrated to the study of the assistant professor and as she turned in at her own gate he appeared upon the porch. "What's the matter?" he asked sharply. "The young man next door dropped Mary on the tar walk." Catherwood clearly distinguished below the child's still frantic yells the grunt of the man who waited on the steps. He was prompted to shout: "You lie; it was a drift," but a quick second thought restrained him. As it was he took the stairs in the darkened hallway in three bounds and, rushing into his room, raved impotently. He kicked the legs of the Morris chair; he kicked the legs of the table; he kicked the backs of the books on the lowest shelf of the rack. He seized a pillow from the divan and proceeded to punch it violently, viciously. Then he flung himself face down upon the divan, and from the heart of the cushions came the muffled words: "I wish the confounded kid had never been born!" After some minutes he rolled over and for a space stared blankly at the ceiling. Then he rose, took a book from the rack and flinging himself into the Morris chair by the window opened it upon his knee. It was a volume of the marvelous and enthralling adventures of the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. II There are two kinds of hazing, as practiced by undergraduates at Ann Arbor; the plain and the ornamental. The first may be a mere practical joke, as the "stacking" of a room, the kidnapping of a freshman toastmaster, or the "losing" of a fraternity initiate in the broad fields that lie between the town and the North Pole.