stiny
was sending at this moment as its special emissaries two huge, portly
figures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from the
halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of
these was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, and
the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself.
And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on
"Archaeological Remains of Mitylene," and the "Use of the Greek
Pluperfect," and little treatises such as "Education and Philanthropy,"
by Dr. Boomer, and "The Excavation of Mitylene: An Estimate of Cost,"
by Dr. Boyster, "Boomer on the Foundation and Maintenance of Chairs,"
etc.

Many a man in city finance who had seen Dr. Boomer enter his office
with a bundle of these monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyes
had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer had
tracked him out for a benefaction to the University, and that all
resistance was hopeless.

When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capitalist's desk his famous pamphlet
on the "Use of the Greek Pluperfect," it was as if an Arabian sultan
had sent the fatal bow-string to a condemned pasha, or Morgan the
buccaneer had served the death-sign on a shuddering pirate.

So they came nearer and nearer, shouldering the passers-by. The sound
of them as they talked was like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard
it. Never did Castor and Pollux come surging into battle as Dr. Boomer
and Dr. Boyster bore down upon the Grand Palaver Hotel.

Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, had hesitated about going to the
university. The university was coming to him. As for those millions of
his, he could take his choice--dormitories, apparatus, campuses,
buildings, endowment, anything he liked but choose he must. And if he
feared that, after all, his fortune was too vast even for such a
disposal, Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up
ancient Mitylene, or modern Smyrna, or the lost cities of the Plain of
Pactolus. If the size of the fortune troubled him, Dr. Boomer would dig
him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for
more.

But if Destiny held all this for Tomlinson in its outstretched palm
before it, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its
toga.

There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole
directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold
they min