"Yes," added Phil Clinton, as he coughed protestingly. "What do you want to get up for and disturb everything, when Tom and I were so nice and quiet? Why can't you sit still and enjoy a good think once in a while? Besides, do you want to give that chair spinal meningitis or lumbago? Our old armchair, that has stuck to us, through thick and thin, for better and for worse--mostly worse, I guess. I say----" "I came near sticking to it, myself," remarked Sidney Henderson, otherwise known as, and called, Sid. "It's like getting out of the middle of a featherbed to leave it. And say, it does act as if it was going to pieces every time one gets in or out of it," he added, making a critical inspection of the chair. "Then why do you want to get in or out?" asked Phil, closing a book, over which he had made a pretense of studying. "Why do you do it, I ask? You may consider that I have moved the previous question, and answer," he went on. "How about it, Tom?" "The gentleman is out of order," decided Tom, a tall, good-looking lad, with the bronzed skin of an athlete, summer and fall, barely dimmed by the enforced idleness of winter. "Sid, you are most decidedly out of order--I think I'm going to sneeze again," and he held up a protesting hand. "No, I'm not, either," he continued. "False alarm. My, what a lot of dust! But, go ahead, Sid, answer the gentleman's query." "Gentleman?" repeated the lad, who had arisen from the easy chair, and there was a questioning note in his voice. "Here! Here! Save that for the amateur theatricals!" cautioned Tom, looking about for something to throw at his chum. "Why did you get up? Answer!" "I wanted to see if it had stopped raining," announced Sid, as he moved over toward one of the two windows in the rather small living room and study, occupied by the three chums, who were completing their sophomore year at Randall College. "Seems to me it's slacking up some." "Slacking up some!" exclaimed Tom. "Stopped raining!" echoed Phil. "Listen to it! Cats and dogs, to say nothing of little puppies, aren't in it. It's a regular deluge. Listen to it!" He held up his hand. Above the fussy ticking of a small alarm clock, which seemed to contain a six-cylindered voice in a one-cylindered body, and which timepiece was resting at a dangerous angle on a pile of books, there sounded the patter of rain on the windows and the tin gutter outside. "Rain, rain, nothing but rain!" grumbled Phil. "We haven't had a decent day for baseball practice in two weeks. I'm sick of the inside cage, and the smell of tan bark. I want to get into the open, with the green grass of the outfield to fall on." "Well, this weather is good for making the grass grow," observed Tom, as he got up from his chair, and joined Sid at the window, down which rain drops were chasing each other as if in glee at the anguish of mind they were causing the three youths.