l. You know it, you liar! I've had enough of this--" You couldn't
hear any more for the shrieks. When a supposedly dead man sticks his
head out of a jog in the ceiling and offers to fight his Mark Antony it
is bound to create some commotion. Even the professors turned white. As
for the girls--great smelling salts, what a cinch! They fainted in
windrows. Some of us carried out as many as six, and you had better
believe we were fastidious in our choice, too.

There had never been such a sensation since Siwash was invented. Between
the panic-stricken, the dazed, the hilarious, the indignant and the
guilty wretches like myself, who were wondering how in thunder there was
going to be any explaining done, that chapel was just as coherent as a
madhouse. And then Hogboom himself burst in a side door, and it took
seven of us to prevent him from reducing Perkins to a paste and
frescoing him all over the chapel walls. Everybody was rattled but
Prexy. I think Prexy's circulation was principally ice water. When the
row was over he got up and blandly announced that classes would take up
immediately and that the Faculty would meet in extraordinary session
that noon.

How did we get out of it? Well, if you want to catch the last car, old
man, I'll have to hit the high spots on the sequel. Of course, it was a
tremendous scandal--a memorial meeting breaking up in a fight. We all
stood to be expelled, and some of the Faculty were sorry they couldn't
hang us, I guess, from the way they talked. But in the end it blew over
because there wasn't much of anything to hang on any one. The telegrams
were all traced to the agent at Weeping Water, and he identified the
sender as a long, short, thick, stout, agricultural-looking man in a
plug hat, or words to that effect. What's more, he declared it wasn't
his duty to chase around town confirming messages--he was paid to send
them. Hogboom had a harder time, but he, too, explained that he had come
home from Weeping Water a day late, owing to a slight attack of
appendicitis, and that when he found himself late for chapel he had
climbed up into the balcony through a side door to hear the chapel talk,
of which he was very fond, and had found, to his amazement, that he was
being reviled by his friends under the supposition that he was dead and
unable to defend himself. Nobody believed Hogboom, but nobody could
suggest any proof of his villainy--so the Faculty gave him an extra
five-thousand-word oration