"Gone are the days--the golden days I'm dreaming of, I think I hear her softly calling (plunkety-plunk) 'Will you be back? Will you be back? (plunk-plunk) Back to the Car-o-li-nah you love?'"(plunkety-plunk), For three golden campus years T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had gayly pursued the even tenor (or _basso_, since he possessed a foghorn, subterranean voice) of his Bannister career. He absolutely refused to take life seriously, and he was forever arousing the wrath--mostly pretended, for no one could be really angry with the genial youth--of his comrades, by twanging his banjo and roaring out rollicking ballads at all hours. He was never so happy as when entertaining a crowd of happy students in his cozy quarters, or escorting a Hicks' Personally Conducted expedition downtown for a Beef-Steak Bust, at his expense, at Jerry's, the rendezvous of hungry collegians. However, despite his butterfly existence, Hicks, possessed of a scintillating mind, always set the scholastic pace for 1919, by means of occasional study-sprints, as he characteristically called them. But when it came to helping his beloved Dad realize a long-cherished ambition to behold his only son and heir shatter Hicks, Sr.'s, celebrated athletic records, it was a different story. T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., ever since he committed the farcical _faux pas_ of running the wrong way with the pigskin in the Freshman-Sophomore football contest of his first year, had been a super-colossal athletic joke at old Bannister. His record to date, beside that reverse touchdown that won for the Sophomores, consisted of scoring a home-run with the bases congested, on a strike-out; of smashing hurdles and cross-bars on the track; endangering his heedless career with the shot and hammer; and making a ridiculous farce of every event he entered, to the vast hilarity of the students, who, with the exception of Butch Brewster, had no idea his ridiculous efforts were in earnest. In the high-jump, however, Hicks had given considerable promise, which to date the grasshopper collegian had failed to keep. Hicks, the lovable, impulsive, and irrepressible, with his invariable sunny disposition, his generous nature, and his democratic, loyal comradeship for everybody, was loved by old Bannister. The students forgave him his pestersome ways, his frequent torturing of them with banjo-twanging and rollicking ballads. His classmates idolized him, Juniors and Sophomores were his true friends, and entering Freshmen always regarded this happy-go-lucky youth as a demigod of the campus. Big Butch Brewster, who was forever futilely lecturing the heedless Hicks, thrust his head from the grub-shack window, fought down a grin, and sternly arraigned his graceless comrade: