It did poor Hoover little good, however. His regiment was soon taken from the comforts of Washington and sent campaigning, and three days' marching through Virginia dust proved more than the poor fellow could stand. He broke down on the eve of battle, had to be sent to the rear in an ambulance, and the regiment said he would be wise to resign: so for once wisdom and Hoover worked together. John, the janitor, lived to tell many a wonderful tale of the times they had when the First Latin had such "fellers" in it as Lawton and Joy, Bertram and Beekman, Julian and Prime. Meeker got a new lease of life with the going out of the old class and the coming in of the new, for the Doctor did not spoil these latter as he had their predecessors, and the Doctor treated him with a consideration that had been lacking a long time, for there were days in the past when Meeker's poverty and troubles, coupled with other circumstantial evidence, had made him the object of the Doctor's suspicions, and Meeker knew it, and thanked heaven for the load that was lifted when Briggs broke down and bore it all with him. As for the Doctor himself, he came at the same hour every day, poked his cane and the old jokes at the occupants on the mourners' bench, and never seemed more tickled in his life than when, from the distant front, there came a joint letter from Damon and Pythias, who happened to meet for one blissful evening. The watch episode was a thing he would never speak of, but shrewd school-boy observers found a topic that would sometimes start him even to the extent of proclaiming subsequent half-holiday, and that was "our polemical young friends" who had abandoned the classic shades of Columbia for the sword. "'_Et tunc pugnabant pugnis_,'" he began one day---- "Ha, young gentlemen of the First Latin, behold the line immortalized by your predecessors of the year agone. Half-holiday to him who completes it with a new reading. "'_Et tunc--pugna--bant pug--nis_'---- "Who supplies the ellipsis? What! a volunteer already? Let us see: '_Et nunc gladiis pugnan_.' Neither brilliant nor metrical, but pregnant with patriotic truth. Half-holiday to Douglas, and---- How have the rest done, Mr. Halsey?" "H'm," says Halsey, "rather worse if anything." "Ha! Ominous report. Take your seats, young gentlemen, and we resume the consideration of Xenophon. What's that suggestion? 'Fresh air to clear your brains?' Loquax redivivus! However, Mr. Halsey,--there may be something in it. We'll try it." THE END. End of Project Gutenberg's From School to Battle-field, by Charles King