the universe, but they
had learned how to run the blamed thing from practicing on the college
during study hours.

Not that I'm knocking on knowledge, you understand. Knowledge is, of
course, a grand thing to have around the house. But nowadays knowledge
alone isn't worth as much as it used to be, seems to me. A man has to
mix it up with imagination, and ingenuity, and hustle, and nerve, and
the science of getting mad at the right time, and a fourteen-year course
of study in understanding the other fellow. The college professors lump
all this in one course and call it applied deviltry. They don't put it
down in the catalogue and they encourage you to cut classes in it. But,
honestly, I wouldn't trade what I learned under Professor Petey Simmons,
warm boy and official gadfly to the Faculty, for all the Lat. and Greek
and Analit. and Diffy. Cal., and the other studies--whatever they
were--that I took in good old Siwash.

You remember Petey, of course. He went through Siwash in four years and
eight suspensions, and came out fresh--as fresh as when he went in,
which is saying a good deal. Every summer during his career the Faculty
went to a rest cure and tried to forget him. He was as handy to have
around school as a fox terrier in a cat show. There are two varieties of
college students--the midnight-oil and the natural-gas kind; and Petey
was a whole gas well in himself. Not that he didn't study. He was the
hardest student in the college, but he didn't recite much in classes.
Sometimes he recited in the police court, sometimes to his Pa back home,
and sometimes the whole college took a hand in looking over his
examination papers. He used to pass medium fair in Horace; sub-passable
in Trig., and extraordinary mediocre in Polikon. But his marks in
Imagination, the Psychological Moment and Dodging Consequences were plus
perfect, extra magnificent, and superlatively some, respectively.

I saw Petey last year. He is in Chicago now. You have to bribe a
doorkeeper and bluff a secretary to get to him--that is, you do if you
are an ordinary mortal. But if you give the Siwash yell or the Eta Bita
Pie whistle in the outside office he will emerge from his office out
over the railing in one joyous jump. He came to Chicago ten years ago
equipped with a diploma and a two-year tailor-bill back at Jonesville
that he had been afraid to tell his folks about. If he had been a
midnight-oil graduate he would have worn out three pairs of shoe