d
laboriously crossing one leg over the other. "Put some more wood on the
fire, Hugh, will you?"

Hugh stirred up the fire, piled on a log or so, and then returned to his
chair, hoping against belief that something really would be accomplished
in the seminar. All the boys, he excepted, were smoking, and all of them
were lolling back in dangerously comfortable attitudes.

"We've got to get going," Pudge continued, "and we aren't going to get
anything done if we just sit around and bull. I'm the prof, and I'm
going to ask questions. Now, don't bull. If you don't know, just say,
'No soap,' and if you do know, shoot your dope." He grinned. "How's that
for a rime?"

"Atta boy!" Carl exclaimed enthusiastically.

"Shut up! Now, the stuff we want to get at to-night is the poetry. No use
spending any time on the composition. My prof said that we would have
to write themes in the exam, but we can't do anything about that here.
You're all getting by on your themes, anyway, aren't you?"

"Yeah," the listening quartet answered in unison, Larry Stillwell adding
dubiously, "Well, I'm getting C's."

"Larry," said Carl in cold contempt, "you're a goddamn liar. I saw a B
on one of your themes the other day and an A on another. What are you
always pulling that low-brow stuff for?"

Larry had the grace to blush. "Aw," he explained in some confusion, "my
prof's full of hooey. He doesn't know a C theme from an A one. He makes
me sick. He--"

"Aw, shut up!" Freddy Dickson shouted. "Let's get going; let's get
going. We gotta learn this poetry. Damn! I don't know anything about it.
I didn't crack the book till two days ago."

Pudge took charge again. "Close your gabs, everybody," he commanded
sternly. "There's no sense in going over the prose lit. You can do that
better by yourselves. God knows I'm not going to waste my time telling
you bone-heads what Carlyle means by a hero. If you don't know Odin from
Mohammed by this time, you can roast in Dante's hell for all of me. Now
listen; the prof said that they were going to make us place lines, and,
of course, they'll expect us to know what the poems are about. Hell!
how some of the boys are going to fox 'em." He paused to laugh. "Jim
Hicks told me this afternoon that 'Philomela' was by Shakspere." The
other boys did not understand the joke, but they all laughed heartily.

"Now," he went on, "I'll give you the name of a poem, and then you tell
me what it's about and who wrote it."

He