s
hunting for a business house which was willing to let an earnest young
scholar enter its employ at the bottom and rise gradually to the top as
the century went by. But Petey wasn't that kind. He had been used to
running the whole college and messing up the universe as far as one
could see from the Siwash belfry if things didn't suit him. So he picked
out the likeliest-looking institution on Dearborn Street and offered it
a position as his employer. He was on the payroll before the president
got over his daze. Two weeks later he promoted the firm to a more
responsible job--that of paying him a bigger salary--and a year ago the
general manager gave up and went to Europe for two years; said he would
take a positive pleasure in coming back and looking at the map of
Chicago after Petey had done it over to suit himself.

Imagination was what did it. You can't take Imagination in any college
classroom, but you can get more of it on the campus in four years than
you can anywhere else in the world. You've got to have a mighty good
imagination to get into any real warm trouble--and by the time you have
gotten out of it again you have had to double its horse-power. That was
Petey's daily recreation. In the morning he would think up an absolutely
air-tight reason for being expelled from Siwash as a disturber, an
anarchist, a superfluosity and a malefactor of great stealth. That night
he would go to his room and figure out an equally good proof that
nothing had happened or that whatever had happened was an act of
Providence and not traceable to any student. Figuring out ways for
selling bonds in carload lots was just recreation to him after a
four-year course of this sort.

But to back in on the main track. I whistled outside of Petey's office
the other day and went in with him past two magnates, three salesmen and
a bank president. I sat with my feet on a mahogany table--I wanted to
put them on an oak desk, but Petey declared mahogany was none too good
for a Siwash man--and we spent an hour talking over the time when Petey
manufactured excitement in wholesale lots at Siwash, with me for his
first assistant and favorite apprentice. Those are my proudest memories.
I won my track S. and got honorably mentioned in three Commencement
exercises; but when I want to brag of my college career do I mention
these things? Not unless I have a lot of time. When I want to paralyze
an alumnus of some rival college with admiration and envy, I te