can pull through. He is his dear father's pride,
and his father's heart is set upon his son's obtaining his degree. Let
us hope he will pull through." For four years every professor had been
pulling Peter through, and the conscience of each had become calloused.
They had only once more to shove him through and they would be free of
him forever. And so, although they did not conspire together, each knew
that of the firing squad that was to aim its rifles at, Peter, HIS rifle
would hold the blank cartridge.

The only one of them who did not know this was Doctor Henry Gilman.
Doctor Gilman was the professor of ancient and modern history at
Stillwater, and greatly respected and loved. He also was the author of
those well-known text-books, "The Founders of Islam," and "The Rise and
Fall of the Turkish Empire." This latter work, in five volumes, had
been not unfavorably compared to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire." The original newspaper comment, dated some thirty years back,
the doctor had preserved, and would produce it, now somewhat frayed and
worn, and read it to visitors. He knew it by heart, but to him it always
possessed a contemporary and news interest.

"Here is a review of the history," he would say--he always referred to
it as "the" history--"that I came across in my TRANSCRIPT."

In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a period that it
was as though the clipping had been printed the previous after-noon.

The members of his class who were examined on the "Rise and Fall," and
who invariably came to grief over it, referred to it briefly as the
"Fall," sometimes feelingly as "the.... Fall." The history began when
Constantinople was Byzantium, skipped lightly over six centuries to
Constantine, and in the last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds
with the downfall of the fourth one and the coming of Suleiman. Since
Suleiman, Doctor Gilman did not recognize Turkey as being on the map.
When his history said the Turkish Empire had fallen, then the Turkish
Empire fell. Once Chancellor Black suggested that he add a sixth volume
that would cover the last three centuries.

"In a history of Turkey issued as a text-book," said the chancellor, "I
think the Russian-Turkish War should be included."

Doctor Gilman, from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, gazed at him in
mild reproach. "The war in the Crimea!" he exclaimed. "Why, I was alive
at the time. I know about it. That is not history."

A