If my recollection serves me aright I have once or twice before touched on sundry chapters in the life and works of the old Major, telling how, for him, nothing of real consequence happened in this world between the surrender of Lee at Appomattox and the day, nearly forty years later, when all his tidy property was wiped out in an unfortunate investment, and he moved out of his suite at the old Gault House and abandoned his armchair in a front window at the Shawnee Club, and, at the age of sixty-four and a salary of twelve dollars a week, took a job as cub reporter on the _Evening Press_; how because he would persist in gnawing at the rinds of old yesterdays instead of nosing into the things of the current day he was a most utter and complete failure at the job; how once through chance, purely, he uncovered the whoppingest scoop that a real reporter could crave for and then chucked it away again to save a woman who by the standards of all proper people wasn't worth saving in the first place; how by compassion of the owner of the paper and against the judgment of everybody else, he hung on all through the summer, a drag upon the organization and a clog on the ankle of City Editor Wilford Devore; how on the opening day of the famous Lyric Hall convention he finally rose to an emergency that was of his liking and with the persuasive aid of a brace of long-barrelled, ivory-handled cavalry revolvers stampeded the Stickney gang, when they tried by force to seize the party machinery, having first put that official bad man and deputy subheader of the opposition, Mink Satterlee, out of business, by love-tapping Mink upon his low and retreating forehead with the butt end of one of his shooting irons; and how then as a reward therefor, he was made war-editor of the sheet, thereafter fitting comfortably and snugly into a congenial berth especially devised and created for his occupancy. All this has elsewhere been told. This present tale, which has to do in part with the Major and in part with the student body of Midsylvania, dates from sometime after the day when he became our war editor, and was writing those long and tiresome special articles of his, dealing favourably with Jackson's Campaign in the Valley, and unfavourably with Sherman's March to the Sea.