As for Roger Hardie, Deering’s exhortation, and even more Deering’s personality, was as a match applied to tinder. His zeal took fire immediately. If the rowing men were like Deering, if rowing made such men, rowing was the thing for him! If honest, serious work profited at all in this untried sport in which experience was held to be so important, Roger would give that work ungrudgingly as long as his presence was tolerated on the squad. This resolve sent him to the gymnasium to exercise every day during the Christmas recess, when, save for himself and Mike and two smaller urchins, Adams’s was bereft of boys. It forced him to look upon himself as, in a fashion, consecrated to a special ambition, none the less wholesome and potent because cherished in secret. It made it easier for him to keep faith with his parents and his own conscience in the presence of the insidious temptations to which he, in common with all boys of his age, was subjected. The tide of boys flooded back to school on the second of January, noisy with reminiscences of good times enjoyed. Talbot came from a camp on the shore of Cape Cod, where he had been shooting with Trask; Ben Tracy from Montreal. Dunn had spent his freedom in New York, where he had “been to something every night and had the highest old kind of a time.” The anecdotes of his experiences furnished him amusement for a week; his listeners tired of them in a much shorter time. Aside from these anecdotes, Dunn brought back little that was new from his vacation, certainly nothing so beneficial to himself or the school as an earnest purpose. He continued to slide downhill with careless content, finding specious excuses to present to teachers for classroom failures, and flattering himself that he was playing a grand rôle in the eyes of his mates as a jaunty, devil-may-care loafer. The winter term in all schools is sacred to work. The boys at Westcott’s, under pressure at home and in school, on the whole did their full stint with faithfulness and good-will. But there was no lack of distraction abroad or fun at school. Outside were the official amusements at Adams’s, skating at the Country Club, occasional dancing parties, lectures for the intellectual, theatre for the frivolous, and jolly visiting among friends for all. At school, some petty excitement was always to be found. A lively recitation has its interest for a keen-witted boy, especially if it exhibits a Dunn trying to palm off an old excuse or a Redfield to originate a new blunder. Some one was usually in trouble, and the trouble of a school-mate, if not too serious, is always interesting to the bystanders. And there were occasions when the amusement was not wholly innocent.