“Why, you’re right in your own dooryard! You’ve no call to be homesick. It might be different if you lived in a cañon twenty-five hundred miles away, as I do.” “I didn’t say I was homesick,” protested Lindsay. “That’s a fact, you didn’t! I wonder how I got the idea we were talking about homesickness.” Wolcott looked sharply at Tompkins, suspicious, as every new boy in strange surroundings, that he was being played upon. But Tompkins merely blinked in return with his blank four-cornered eyes, and Wolcott’s suspicions vanished. “I should think it would grow monotonous after a while,” he said, “just studying and reciting and going to chapel and the gymnasium.” Tompkins grinned. “Beastly monotonous; but that programme doesn’t exist outside the school catalogue. The fact is there’s so everlasting much going on that it seems wicked to waste time on such ordinary things as studying and going to recitations. That’s what Smith and Wilder thought.” And as Lindsay naturally wished to know about Smith and Wilder, Tompkins consented to explain. “They had this room earlier in the year. Smith came all the way from Omaha for the benefits of the institution. He cut four recitations in two weeks and the third week he was on his way back to the West. Then Wilder turned up and took the room. He wasn’t a strong boy, his mother said, and she got him excused from gymnasium on a doctor’s certificate. I never heard whether all the cigarettes he smoked were on the doctor’s certificate, too, but he proved too sickly to stand the strain, and after a couple of months was sent home to his mamma. You’re the third.” Lindsay smiled uneasily. “I hope there isn’t a hoodoo on the place.” “Oh, no, nothing special. They fire here by platoons. According to Tom Riley this is a record year,—fifty-two to date—and the firing season is just under way. What are you, middler or senior? I saw you to-day in senior French.” “I’m a mixture of senior and middler, with two subjects in the junior,” replied Lindsay, who was beginning to feel ashamed of his amphibious position. “Then you must be with the two Pecks. I’d give a silver dollar to be with that combination. They’re more fun than a box of monkeys!” “They room in this entry, don’t they?” asked Lindsay. “Very much so, and they’re always running in and out, singly and in pairs, and always up to some shine or other. If you didn’t know that there were only two, you’d feel sure there was at least a bushel of them.” “Instead of half,” said Lindsay, smiling. “Just half,” returned Tompkins. “Know any fellows yet?” “Two or three have spoken to me. Marchmont, who seems a very nice fellow, and Poole, and that big Laughlin.” Tompkins rose. “You’d better be a bit careful about making friends until you know who’s who. In a school like this it isn’t so easy to shake friends as it is to make ’em. But you won’t be going wrong to tie up with Phil Poole, if he gives you the chance.”