d over into the Greek
alphabet; and everybody predicted that you would be a great man if
anybody ever found any use for calculus. And yet the chief ambition of
your life was to find a way of tampering with the college clock so that
it would run twice as fast as its schedule. You used to sit around and
figure all evening over it and declare that if you could only do it once
and watch the profs. letting out classes early and going home to supper
at one P. M. you would consider your life well spent. Sounds fiddling
now, doesn't it? But I admired you for it then. I really looked up to
you, Bill, as a man with a firm, fixed purpose, while I was just a
trifler who would be satisfied to steal the hands of the clock or jolly
it into striking two hundred times in a row.

There was Rearick, for instance. He was the smartest man in our class.
Took scholarship prizes as carelessly as a policeman takes peanuts from
a Dago stand. Since then he's gone up so fast that every time I see him
I insult him by congratulating him on getting the place he's just been
promoted from. But what was Rearick's hobby at Siwash? Stealing hatpins.
He had four hundred hatpins when he graduated, and he never could see
anything wrong in it. Guess he's got them yet. Perkins is in Congress
already. He out-debated the whole Northwest and wrote pieces on subjects
so heavy that you could break up coal with them. But I never saw him so
earnest in debate as he was the night he talked old Bill Morrison into
letting him drive his hack for him all evening. He told me he had driven
every hack in town but Bill's, and that Bill had baffled him for two
years. It cost him four dollars to turn the trick, but he was happier
after it than he was when he won the Siwash-Muggledorfer debate. Said he
was ready to graduate now--college held nothing further for him.
Perkins' brains weren't addled, because he has been working them double
shift ever since. He just had the college microbe, that's all. It gets
into your gray matter and makes you enjoy things turned inside out. You
remember "Prince" Hogboom's funeral, don't you?

What year was it? Why, ninety-ump-teen. What? That's right, you got out
the year before. I remember they held your diploma until you paid for
the library cornerstone that your class stole and cut up into
paper-weights. Well, by not staying the next year you missed the most
unsuccessful funeral that was ever held in the history of Siwash or
anywhere else. It