to take him seriously. And the
strutting, pompous little man, who referred grandly to "my wife," and
then to "the madame," and finally to "my landlady," in a rather
elaborate attempt at jocularity, laughed alone at his merriment along
this line, and never knew that no one cared for his humour.

So in his early forties Editor Brownwell dried up and grew yellow and
began to dye his mustaches and his eyebrows, and to devote much time
to considering his own importance. "Throw it out," said Brownwell to
the foreman, "not a line of it shall go!" He had just come home from a
trip and had happened to glance over the proof of the article
describing the laying of the corner-stone of Ward University.

"But that's the only thing that happened in town this week, and Mrs.
Brownwell wrote it herself."

"Cut it out, I say," insisted Brownwell, and then threw back his
shoulders and marched to his desk, snapping his eyes, and
demonstrating to the printers that he was a man of consequence. "I'll
teach 'em," he roared. "I'll teach 'em to make up their committees and
leave me out."

He raged about the office, and finally wrote the name of Philemon R.
Ward in large letters on the office blacklist hanging above his desk.
This list contained the names which under no circumstances were to
appear in the paper. But it was a flexible list. The next day John
Barclay, who desired to have his speech on the laying of the
corner-stone printed in full, gave Brownwell twenty dollars, and a
most glowing account of the event in question appeared in the
_Banner_, and eloquence staggered under the burden of praise which
Brownwell's language loaded upon the shoulders of General Ward.

It is now nearly a generation since that corner-stone was laid. Boys and
girls who then were children have children in the university, and its
alumni include a brigadier in the army, a poet, a preacher of national
renown, two college presidents, an authority upon the dynamics of living
matter, and two men who died in the American mission at Foo Chow during
the uprising in 1900. When General Ward was running for President of the
United States on one of the various seceding branches of the prohibition
party, while Jeanette Barclay was a little girl, he found the money for
it; two maiden great-aunts on his mother's side of the family had half a
million dollars to leave to something, and the general got it. They
willed it to him to hold in trust during his lifetime, but the day