You needn't grin, Bill. You were just as bad. I remember you were the biggest math. shark in college. You could do calculus problems that took all the English letters from A to Z and then slopped over into the Greek alphabet; and everybody predicted that you would be a great man if anybody ever found any use for calculus. And yet the chief ambition of your life was to find a way of tampering with the college clock so that it would run twice as fast as its schedule. You used to sit around and figure all evening over it and declare that if you could only do it once and watch the profs. letting out classes early and going home to supper at one P. M. you would consider your life well spent. Sounds fiddling now, doesn't it? But I admired you for it then. I really looked up to you, Bill, as a man with a firm, fixed purpose, while I was just a trifler who would be satisfied to steal the hands of the clock or jolly it into striking two hundred times in a row. There was Rearick, for instance. He was the smartest man in our class. Took scholarship prizes as carelessly as a policeman takes peanuts from a Dago stand. Since then he's gone up so fast that every time I see him I insult him by congratulating him on getting the place he's just been promoted from. But what was Rearick's hobby at Siwash? Stealing hatpins. He had four hundred hatpins when he graduated, and he never could see anything wrong in it. Guess he's got them yet. Perkins is in Congress already. He out-debated the whole Northwest and wrote pieces on subjects so heavy that you could break up coal with them. But I never saw him so earnest in debate as he was the night he talked old Bill Morrison into letting him drive his hack for him all evening. He told me he had driven every hack in town but Bill's, and that Bill had baffled him for two years. It cost him four dollars to turn the trick, but he was happier after it than he was when he won the Siwash-Muggledorfer debate. Said he was ready to graduate now--college held nothing further for him. Perkins' brains weren't addled, because he has been working them double shift ever since. He just had the college microbe, that's all. It gets into your gray matter and makes you enjoy things turned inside out. You remember "Prince" Hogboom's funeral, don't you?