ssing purposes. Thereupon with
that prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which has been
conspicuously characteristic of him all his life, he got a book, read it
hard all of the day and night before the examination--and passed in
physiology!

The story of Herbert Hoover's college life reveals no startling features
to distinguish it from the college careers of other thousands of boys,
endowed with intelligence, energy, and ambition, but not with money, and
hence forced to earn their living as they went along. Nevertheless it
does reveal many of the main characteristics that we know so well today.
For he did things all through those four years in the same way that he
does them today, promptly, positively, and quietly. They were mostly
already done before it was generally recognized that he was doing them.

His two hundred dollars could not last long even in a college of no
tuition fees and an unusually simple student life. He had to earn his
way all the time, and he earned it by hard work, directed, however, by
good brains. Many a story, most interesting but, unfortunately, mostly
untrue, has been told of his various expedients to earn the money
necessary for his board and lodging, clothes, and books. Not a few of
these stress his expertness as waiter in student dining-rooms.
Undoubtedly he would have been an expert waiter if he had been a waiter
at all. But he was not. A famous San Francisco chef has often been
quoted in interesting detail as to the "hash-slinging" cleverness of the
future American food controller in the dining-room which this chef
managed--by the way, just _after_ Hoover left college--in the great
Stanford dormitory in those early days. But, though interesting, these
details are mythical. As are also the accounts of the care he took of
professorial gardens, although that would have been an excellent
substitute for the outdoor exercise and play which he found little time
for in college except in geological field excursions and camps. Nor was
he ever nurse to the professorial babies, which also has been often
placed to his credit by imaginative story-tellers.

For at the very beginning of his college life Herbert Hoover and another
distinguished son of Stanford, known to the early students as Rex Wilbur
and to the present ones as Prex Wilbur--for he is now the university's
president--put their heads together and decided that if they had any
brains at all in those heads they would make them count in t