Graduation was but little more than a year off, when, the contents of the garret being exhausted, the young man realized to his consternation that his class standing was very low. His place at the end of the college course depended on his average class standing all through. He had received none of the sixteen junior parts which were given out during the junior year, and to his dismay the English orations, corresponding to the junior parts at the end of the course, were reduced to twelve. There was but one course open to the ambitious, spirited boy--to offset the low average of his earlier terms by an exceptionally high average during his last. Romances and poems were laid aside, and from that time forward until Commencement he was up at five in the morning, and by nine o'clock every night he was in bed, and tired enough to drop asleep at once. Mr. Reed says very frankly that he did not relish this regimen, for by nature he is indolent. Apropos of this, it was a common saying among his comrades that Reed would be somebody some day, if he were not so lazy. The consequences of his three years of novel-reading were such a serious matter to him that he was afraid to go and hear the result of the final examinations but remained in his room until a friend came to tell him that he was one of the first five in his class in his average for the entire course. This is the other side of Reed, "the lazy." Besides this success, his oration on "The Fear of Death" won the first prize for English composition. It was in delivering it that Mr. Reed felt the first emotions of the orator, when every eye in the audience was riveted upon him, and when the profound silence that prevailed told the deep interest which his words aroused. Of the year's work which won for him the privilege of delivering it on that Commencement Day, thirty-three years ago, Mr. Reed says that it was the hardest of his life, and the only time he has forced himself up to his full limit for so long a period.