On the other hand, it would be the disagreeable duty of the chronicler to set down in black and white all the unpleasant and trying experiences resulting from the ceaseless espionage that clouded his daily life and doings. All that need be said about this unhappy phase of his development may be confined to a single sentence: he was never free from the advice, direction and criticism of four devoted old men. He had advice from Mr. Sage, direction from the Messrs. Sikes and Link, and a plaintive sort of criticism from his father. Serepta Grimes, who loved him as she would have loved a son of her own, gave him the right kind of advice, good soul that she was. She advised him to be patient; he would be twenty-one before he knew it, and then he could tell ’em to mind their own business. It would be necessary, she ruefully acknowledged, to tell practically the entire population of Rumley to mind its own business, but the ones that really mattered were Silas Link and Joe Sikes. “But they are such corking old boys, Aunt Serepta,” he was wont to lament; “and they are trying to be good to me. I wouldn’t hurt their feelings for the world.” “They’re a couple of buzzards, Oliver.” “I get pretty sore at them sometimes,” he would confess, crinkling his brows. “But I guess I’d better wait till I’m past thirty before I jump on ’em, hadn’t I?” “I guess maybe you had,” Serepta would agree, for down in her heart she too was afraid. He was seventeen when he left the Rumley high-school and became a freshman at the State University. There had been some talk of sending him to one of the big Eastern colleges, but when Mr. Sikes pointed out to Mr. Link that he didn’t see how either one of them could give up his business and go East to spend the winters, the latter flopped over and took sides with him against Oliver senior, who was for sending him to Princeton because Mary had taken a strong fancy to that distant seat of learning after hearing Mr. Sage dilate upon its standards. He made the football and baseball teams in his sophomore year, and was “spiked” by the most impenetrable Greek fraternity before he had been on the campus twenty-four hours. His fame had preceded him. He also was able to show his newly-made freshman friends so many of the fine points about boxing that they proclaimed him a marvel and wanted to know where he had picked it all up. He refused to divulge the long-kept secret. Moreover, he astonished them with his unparalleled skill at turning cartwheels. And besides all this, he astonished the faculty by being up in his studies from the week he entered college to the day he left it with a diploma in his hand. He took the full course in engineering, and not without reason was the prediction of the Dean of the School that one day Oliver Baxter would make his mark in the world.