"You are on the threshold of your college career, old man!" he thundered impressively, though he might as well have tried to shoot holes in a battleship with a pop-gun, "What you do now will make or break you. Do you want the fellows as friends or as enemies; do you want comradeship, or loneliness and ostracism? You have it in your power to do two _big_ things, to win the Championship for your Alma Mater, and to win to yourself the entire student-body, as friends; will you do that, and build a firm foundation for your college years, or betray your Alma Mater, and gain the enmity of old Bannister!" Followed more fervid periods, with such phrases as, "For your Alma Mater," "Because of your college spirit," "For dear old Bannister," and "For the Gold and Green!" predominating; all of which terms, to the stolid, unimaginative Thorwald being fully as intelligible as Hindustani. They appealed to him not to betray his Alma Mater; they implored him, for his love of old Bannister; they besought him, because of his college spirit; and all the time, for all that the Prodigious Prodigy understood, they might as well have remained silent. "I will tell you something," spoke Thor, at last, with an air of impatient resignation, "and don't bother me again, please! I have come to Bannister College to get an education, and I have the right to do so, without being pestered. I pay my bills, and I am entitled to all the knowledge I can purchase. I look from my window, and I see boys, whose fathers are toiling, sacrificing, to send them here. Instead of studying, to show their gratitude, they loaf around the campus, or in their rooms, twanging banjos and guitars, singing silly songs, and sky-larking. I don't know what all this rot is you are talking of; 'college spirit,' 'my Alma Mater,' and so on. I do not want to play football; I do not like the game; I need the time for my study, so I will not play. Both my father and myself have labored and sacrificed to send me to college. The past five years, with one great ambition to go to college and learn, I have toiled like a galley-slave. "And now, when opportunity is mine, do you ask me to _play_? You want me to loaf around, wasting precious time better spent in my studies. What do I care whether the boys like me, or hate me? Bah! I can take any two of you, and knock your heads together! Their friendship or enmity won't move me. I shall study, learn. I will not waste time in senseless foolishness, and I _won't_ play football again."