It was after the examinations were over, and there was not much left for a Freshman to do but to burn his green cap and go home, that Larry and little Purdick took a farewell evening hike out to the bridge which bore their class numerals. It had been a perfect June day, and the evening matched it harmoniously. A light shower the night before had laid the dust, spring green was waving from the trees and nodding to them from the fields, and the song of the cardinal was abroad in the land. “You didn’t turn out for the bridge scrap, did you, Purdy?” said Larry, as they hoisted themselves to seats on the approach parapet where he and Dick Maxwell had sat through a pretty painful session one evening some few weeks earlier. “You know I didn’t. About that time o’ night I was washing dishes in Hassler’s kitchen.” “But you’ll be in the next one. We’ll be the defenders next fall, and we want to keep those old figures up there for another year.” “Lot of good I’d be!” scoffed the small one. “If we should happen to get a few grasshoppers in the next Freshman class, perhaps I might be able to pull a leg off of one or two of ’em. But that’s about all.” “Size isn’t everything,” Larry offered. Having plenty of it himself, he could easily disregard the lack of it in others. Then: “Have you always been off weight, Purdy?” “Ever since I can remember. My mother was small.” In all their close association as room-mates Purdick had rarely talked of himself or his past, and never of his people. But now, perhaps because the parting for the summer was so near at hand, he let out a little. “We were poor folks,” he went on; “poor in the way you don’t know anything about, because your father had a trade and a good one. Mine was a day laborer, and there were seven mouths to fill.” “Five children?” said Larry. “That’s our number at home.” “That was our number, but it isn’t any more; there are only two of us now――my sister Alice and I.” “And your father and mother?” “Both dead. Mother was never very strong, and the fight was too hard for her. After the other children died, she sort of lost her――her courage, I guess. That left only father and two children; and Alice wasn’t big enough to do much. That’s how I learned to cook and wash dishes.” “Then your father died?” “He was killed――in the steel works. It was an open-hearth furnace, and he was on the puddler’s gang. There was a loose board in the run-way, and the hand-rail was broken. The men had complained, time and again, but nothing was done. One day father slipped.” He stopped abruptly, and when he spoke again it was to say, “Do you wonder that things have made sort of an anarchist of me, Larry?” “Huh!” said Larry, “you’re not much of an anarchist.” “Not the long-haired kind, maybe. But I’ve got to stay on my own side of the fence. There’s a horrible lot of injustice in this old world, Larry.”