“Not if you’re willing to work as you have,” said Thropper. “Though I’d hate to have you go. I thought you might be my right hand man when I marry, next fall!” “Marry?” “Yes, in September. Oh, you’ll get an invitation even if you won’t be able to attend, Priddy,” he added, solemnly, “I wouldn’t try to keep you from going East even with my wedding. Try it, old fellow. You owe it to yourself, now that you’ve got such a good start here. This place doesn’t pretend to be in competition with the big Eastern institutions. Evangelical University is concerned mostly with giving a fellow a start towards them. The faculty would be only too glad to have you leave here, if they knew you were going to stick to your education in the East.” “I’ll do it, Thropper!” I replied. The busy season of Commencement was ushered in: a busy time even for those of us who were far, very far from graduation. My “class” voted that I represent them with an oration on “Class Day.” No classic, intellectual, or sentimental event was Class Day at Evangelical University, but, rather, a Western outflow of burlesque and banter. Every day for a week I practised my “oration” in the attic of the University building. In this speech I had put, as all previous Class Day orators had made a practise of putting, puns, alliterations, pompous passages, personalities, and much bathos. I tried to perfect myself in its delivery, not knowing just what experiences I should encounter on the day I should speak it. A wild, untamed, yelling, crowding procession filled the chapel hall, each class in a section by itself and the “orators” seated on the platform. It came my turn. I stepped to the front and raised my hand for the first word when suddenly the class next above mine yelled, poked up slang signs, and then from the square ventilator hole high above my head darted a sparrow with a trailing streamer of our class ribbon fluttering from its tail. At every sentence, nearly every word, I had to pause on account of the yellings, the banter, and the interruptions caused by flying hats and scudding pieces of pasteboard. After about a half hour of disciplined posing, I finally concluded the “oration” amid the admiring plaudits of my class. Thus orator followed orator, each one outdoing the other with satire, pun, and rhetorical nonsense. To the accompaniment of a thudding fight which was taking place between the representatives of two classes over our heads where the bird had been sent down, Class Day came to an end, and my active life at Evangelical University likewise. _Chapter XVIII. Thropper Unfolds Something Better than Canned Foods. A Lesson with the Flat Iron. Thropper Proposes that I Chaperone Horses_ “How are you going to get back to Massachusetts, Priddy?” asked Thropper when I was shuffling some photographs which I had taken down from a wire rack on the wall. “Oh, I’ll have to try to get work in a factory or on a farm about here,” I answered, “until I earn my fare!”