Jimmie started a little, inside, as he realized for the first time the base of his aversion to dragging himself out on the trip. He turned, half-mechanically, and began tugging at his collar. That Phantom should never come between him and one single thing he wanted to do. It might embitter it all, but it could never prevent him from the outward act. He threw his tie over a chair and took off his coat with unnecessary emphasis in the movement. Ten minutes later he was treading the primrose path of dalliance with an arm around "Nosey" Marion. There was a cool breeze off the bay, bringing the scent of salt water along with the odor of spruce-trees. A voice from the upper regions of the Hall called out to the cavalcade, crawling through the half-darkness along the road: "He-ea, you! Bring some back for me!" A dozen windows slammed open at that, and twenty throats took up the noise. Pellams was for answering, but Lyman discreetly checked him. Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his hat to the cool air. "This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!" "Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the muse!" The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased. "That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield--just to be original." "And you'll kill the traffic." "Chain the poet!" "If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent." These from half-a-dozen voices at once. "Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield--just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back." "Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight." "It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew. "How would Jimmie's sore-head do?" Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! _A bas_ Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long, "To drive dull care away!" And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.