Having grown up with tools and forges and machinery, Larry thought of the shop work as an easy walk-over, and so it had been up to this day of helpless botchings. But now he couldn’t seem to get anything right. The hour was given to welding, and the metal simply wouldn’t weld. Larry cleaned his fire again and again; put it out once and built it over afresh; and still he made nothing but botches. “You’ll have to do better than this, Donovan,” warned the instructor, at the close of the futile hour. Then he added something that wasn’t quite deserved. “You fellows who have had a bit of outside shop experience mustn’t think you know it all. I can’t give you anything better than a cipher on this morning’s work.” With this for a send-off it wasn’t very strange that the entire day went wrong. Larry blew up in English, went to pieces in Physics, made a mess of his drawing hour, and even stumbled in Math.――in the very lesson in which he had successfully coached his “lame dogs.” “This sure has been one beautiful day!” he growled to Dick, when they were settled in their room for the evening. “I’ve gone bunk on everything I’ve touched!” “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Dick easily. “Everybody has a day like that once in a while. You just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning; that’s all.” Very sensibly, Larry tried to let it go at that; but, oddly enough, it refused to “go.” Day after day the failures continued, usually beginning with the shop work and then spreading, like a contagious disease, to everything else. In the foundry his flasks “fell down,” and the castings came out looking as if a dog had gnawed them. In the pattern shop, plane-irons that he had whetted to a razor-edge nicked and spoiled the job. In the machine shop it was even worse; every machine tool he tried to use bucked on him and ruined something. Of course, there were consequences――mighty unpleasant ones. With poor markings, or what you might call no markings, he was called before the chief of the shop staff, warned once that he would have to pull his standing up, warned a second time, and then, one morning, a faculty notice came. He was falling below passing grades in everything but Mathematics. If he couldn’t do better, the faculty would reluctantly be obliged to conclude that he hadn’t sufficient preparation for a college course. “I don’t know what is the matter with me,” he confessed to Dick on the day when the faculty notice came. “I’m just all shot to pieces. Why, Dick, I don’t know myself any more! Things that used to come as easy as rolling off a log stump me as if I’d never heard of them before.” “Not sick, are you?” Dick queried sympathetically. “Only in my fool head and hands. I break everything I touch; and when I get a question in class, I simply blow up. I don’t blame the professors. Anybody would think I was solid ivory from the neck up!”