But in Mathematics it was exactly the other way around. Here the big, athletic Freshman soon became known as a “shark,” and a good-natured “shark” is an institution not to be undervalued in any college. Before the foot-ball season closed, Larry was acquiring a small following of “lame dogs”; fellows who had to be helped over the stile, if they were going to get over at all; hence, Dickie Maxwell’s wail about pack-mules and such. Down underneath the good-nature which prompted these helpings, Larry had a sort of ill-defined motive which was more or less to his credit. As a son of a workingman he had entered college with the feeling that he was going to be looked down upon, and certain fellows with more money than sense had either thoughtlessly or maliciously helped the feeling to grow. But in the better part of him, Larry was too square and man-sized to become that bitterest of all things, the college grouch, so he had begun to open out a bit on the side of the helpings, this though he was still hanging on to the idea that between the son of an ex-locomotive engineer and, let us say, a member of the richest Greek-Letter fraternity, there was a gulf fixed, great and impassable. Dick had been gone a full hour, and the second of the English themes was well on its way to completion when the door opened and little Purdick slid in. At first sight, anybody would have said that Charles Purdick had certainly missed the mark by a broad mile in choosing an engineering course. Undersized, with a thin, eager face and pale-blue, tired eyes, he looked more like a candidate for a sanitarium than anything else. “Hello, old scout!” said Larry in a cheerful growl. “Thought maybe you’d be showing up. Drag out that easy-chair and flop. Had a tough day?” The undersized one tried to laugh his weariness off. “If you ever have to work any part of your way through, don’t you take a restaurant for it,” he advised; adding, “I don’t mind waiting on table and having to refuse the tips――I’m sort o’ case-hardened to that now. But the dish-washing sure does get next to me.” “I’ll bet,” said Larry. “At home I was lucky; have a sister two years younger than I am. But that’s all that saved me. Stuck on the trig, again?” “I’m always stuck on the trig. If I didn’t love machinery so well, I’d think I’d made the mistake of my life in coming to Sheddon. Yet the High School Math. didn’t bother me so much.” “Pull up your chair and let’s have a crack at it,” said Larry. “I looked it over just after supper, and it isn’t so awfully rocky, this time.”