If the primitive custom--in vogue, I believe, at certain colleges--of choosing by vote “the most popular man,” “the most unpopular man,” “the handsomest man,” and so on, were numbered among Harvard traditions (thank Heaven, it isn’t!), Wolcott would never have been elected to adorn the first of these distinctions. He would have had a large and enthusiastic backing for the second, and some scattering ballots for the third. Yet the material perquisites of popularity were his, for Wolcott presented the thought-compelling spectacle of a disliked person, to whom every social honour was paid with as much regularity as if he had come to Cambridge with a pocketful of promissory notes that called for them--to be drawn out and cashed when due. One never said of Wolcott, as is said of some fellows, “He _made_ the first ten of the Dicky”--implying a certain amount of enterprise or discretion. The assertion that he _was_ a first ten man required no implication; it was enough, for it was so ordained. Now this fact is one of significance,--of greater significance than any one, not a Harvard man, is likely to attach to the sophomore society (and it is a wise Harvard child that knows the mother of its soul). But just why Wolcott--arrogant, combative, unresponsive--had been a first ten man, is for a treatise, not a story. It is sufficient to say that he was one, and that it never occurred to his numerous acquaintances to question his individual fitness for that honour, however much they lamented the system that gave it to him. Wolcott himself never questioned it. Only in the circumstance of his having been omitted from the chosen first, would the subject have seemed to him in any way markworthy. His attitude from babyhood towards anything worth having, that he didn’t already possess, had been one of imminent proprietorship. Once when his nurse, holding him up to the window, had asked in the peculiarly imbecile way of nurses, “Whose moon is that, Searsy?” Searsy had replied, as one compelled to explain the obvious, “That’s Mr. Langdon Wolcott’s moon.” The gentleman referred to was his father. This attitude Searsy had practised through the nursery, and the fitting school, until, by the time he went to college, it was an exceedingly muscular, well-developed posture indeed. And that’s partly why he was called Wolcott The Magnificent. The other reason provoked less difference of opinion; he really was magnificent. Everybody who knew about arms, and legs, and chests, and things, agreed that he was. And as the people who don’t know about such things always have a deep admiration--either frank or sneaking--for them, Sears’s imperial subtitle was rarely disputed. As early as the close of his freshman year, the name spread to town. Girls with opera-glasses used to sit at back dining-room windows on the water-side of Beacon Street to see him row past with his crew. They took the same tender interest in the way the April sun and wind tanned his