ent through school with a cloud over his young life, in the
shape of a Pa who gave him a thousand dollars a year for expenses and
wouldn't allow a single cent of it to be spent for frivolity. And he had
a blanket definition for frivolity that covered everything from dancing
parties to pie at an all-night lunch counter. By hard work Petey could
spend about four hundred dollars on necessary expenses, and that left
him six hundred dollars a year to blow in on illuminated manuscripts,
student lamps, debating club dues and prints of the old masters. He had
to borrow money from us all through the year, and then hold a great
auction of his art trophies and student lamps, before vacation came, in
order to pay us back.

But all of these troubles weren't even annoyances beside what Keg
Rearick had to endure. Keg was an affectionate contraction of his real
nickname--"Keghead." He had the worst case of "Pa" I ever heard of. He
was a regular high explosive--one of these fine, old, hair-triggered
gentlemen, who consider that they have done all the thinking that the
world needs and refuse to have any of their ideas altered or edited in
any particular. Keg had had his life laid out for him since the day of
his birth, and when he left for Siwash--on the precise day announced by
his father eighteen years before--the old man stood him up and
discoursed with him as follows:

"My son, I am about to give you the finest education obtainable. You are
to go down to Siwash and learn how to be a credit to me. Let me impress
it on you that that is your only duty. You will meet there companions
who will try to persuade you that there are other things to be done in
college besides becoming a scholar. You will pay no attention to them.
You are to spend your time at your books. You are to lead your class in
Latin and Greek. Mathematics I am not so particular about. You are to
waste no time on athletics and other modern curses of college. I shall
pay your expenses and I shall come down occasionally to see how you are
progressing. And you know me well enough to know that if I find you
deviating from the course I have laid out in any particular, you will
return home and go into the store at six dollars a week."

That's the way Keg always repeated it to us. With that affectionate
farewell ringing in his ears he came on down to Jonesville; and when the
Eta Bita Pies saw his honest features and his particularly likable
smile, they surrounded and assimilat