HARVARD EPISODES BY CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU [Illustration: colophon] BOSTON COPELAND AND DAY MDCCCXCVII First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897 Second edition (5000 copies) December, 1897 COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY, 1897 To W. A. DEAR W. A. I have written about a very little corner of a very great place; but one that we knew well, and together. C. M. F. CONTENTS PAGE THE CHANCE 1 THE SERPENT’S TOOTH 57 WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT 77 WELLINGTON 179 BUTTERFLIES 201 A DEAD ISSUE 249 THE CLASS DAY IDYL 297 Harvard Episodes THE CHANCE Two men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.