what had passed
after that day when he had fled into the mountains, of the coming of
Rufus Blight and the disappearance of Penelope out of my life; I had
much to ask him of her and of himself, and then to lead on to my
present quandary. The labor was without any reward. Weeks passed and
he did not answer. I wrote to Valerian Harassan and was honored with a
prompt reply--his friend Mr. Henderson had returned to San Francisco
and he had forwarded my letter there. "But you had as well try to
correspond with the will-o'-the-wisp," he wrote. "When last I talked
with him, he spoke rather vaguely of going to China and making a trip
afoot to Lhasa." Nevertheless, I wrote again, and it was a year later
when both of my letters came back to me bearing the post-marks of many
cities from coast to coast, to be opened at last by the dead-letter
office.

The Professor was silent. Within a week of my graduation I found
myself still in a quandary as to my course, and then it came about that
it was set for me by the last man in the world whom at that moment I
would have chosen for a pilot. This was Boller of '89.

Boller's father was the owner of a daily newspaper in a small inland
city, and in the two years since he had left McGraw the son had risen
to the chief editorship. His return to college that year was in the
nature of a triumphal progress. He sat with the faculty in the morning
chapel service, and Doctor Todd took occasion to refer to the presence
of a distinguished alumnus who had made his mark in the profession of
journalism. In two years Boller had matured to the wisdom and manner
of fifty. He had abandoned the exaggerated clothes of his college days
for careless, baggy black. His hair had grown long and was dishevelled
by much combing with the fingers, and the mustache, once so carefully
trimmed and curled, now drooped mournfully, and he had added a tiny
goatee to his facial adornments. Drooping glasses on his nose, with a
broad black ribbon suspended from them, gave him an appearance of
intellectuality, so astonishing a transformation that it was hard for
me to believe that this was the same Boller who had greeted me four
years before on the college steps. The next morning after his
reappearance Doctor Todd announced that our distinguished alumnus had
been induced to speak informally to the students that evening on
journalism and its appeal to young men. In the role of a very old man,
Boller from the chape