It is strange how some event towards which you have been working, and which seemed to fill earth and sky till you reached it, at once then sinks down and becomes hardly distinguishable from the plain. So passed by the examination to Magnus Kindred. In fact everybody is so fagged out by the 12th of June, tired with work, with gaiety and excitement, that feeling seems swallowed up of high pressure. This may be one reason why the bad success of other men affects so little those who have won through. Exceptionally strong as class feeling is at West Point, the dropped names seem to make very slight impression. And in some cases, of course, there is no surprise. When a man bones nothing but mischief, and tries to crowd into the three weeks before examination the study which should have filled six months, June is not always kind to him. Unless, indeed, he be one of those men who are pure mathematics--and even then the discipline column may cut him down. So it was with small surprise that Magnus heard Chapman's name among the "found deficient." Chapman did not whimper, but he took it hard. "It's that beastly calculus!" he confided to Magnus, in the hurried moments of parting. "Oh, yes! I know what you mean by raising your eyebrows, but a man couldn't live here if he didn't run it now and then." "But you see a man can't always live here if he does," said Magnus. "Bosh! Yes, he can. Only they don't all run against old Towser every time, as I did. No, it wasn't that at all, it was the calculus." And doubtless, in great measure, it was. Another boy, from far away, fairly came to tears. "I don't see how I am to go home!" he said. "I don't know what my mother will say!" While another, who had got a turn-back, liked so little what his mother _did_ say that he gave her a sharp little lecture on the Graduation ground. "I can't tell what makes you go on so!" he burst forth. "I'm only turned back. Lots of men are sent away altogether. Why do you talk like that? What's the matter?" Poor mothers! It is often pathetic to hear them explain the case to other people. "He's a good boy, Miss Smith; but you know he has always been delicate. Hard study never agreed with him." (True, this last.) "You see, Mrs. Brown, he has had such trouble with his eyes that I wonder he has kept up at all. I really must speak to the Superintendent about the study lights. Then these early recitations. Why, at home we never thought of waking him up till eight o'clock, and then gently, you know, and by degrees. And now he says that gun just goes through his head without a word of preparation. I suppose, really, that is what ails his eyes." "Everything here is so wretchedly mismanaged!" commented a wise and sympathetic damsel. "The cadets are abused at every turn. I don't see how they stand it. It is the meanest place!"