ilyn?"

"But we are reading, Mr. Elvin. Honestly."

"Oh, I see." His voice was thickly sarcastic. "And what's the title of
your book?"

"Toynbee's _Study of History_."

"You've given up Grace Livingston Hill? Could you summarize Toynbee for
us, Marilyn?"

"In another ten minutes, Mr. Elvin. I still have sixty pages to read."

Elvin turned savagely to another girl. "Mabel Travis! What are you
reading?"

The buxom girl looked up languidly. For a split second her big eyes
seemed focused on a distant prospective. "Why--why this, Mr. Elvin." She
held up her book so he could see the title.

"_Hypnotism in Theory and Practice_," he snorted. And Mabel's I/Q was
71! "You've outgrown the comics, Mabel?"

"In a sense, yes, Mr. Elvin."

Elvin was saved from further disorientation by the interruption of an
office messenger with a special bulletin announcing a second period
assembly. By the time he had read it, his anger was under control. He
let the reading go on and spent the rest of the period plodding through
the examinations. There was not an error in any of the papers. From the
prospective of the day's events, Elvin later realized that, however
personally unnerving, his own particular crisis had been a minor one.

* * * * *

The first full scale public disaster came during the assembly, when the
entire student body--nearly one hundred and fifty youngsters--was
gathered in the auditorium. The principal, as always, rose to lead them
in the Alma Mater. He was a huge, hatchet-faced, white-haired man, the
terror of evil-doer and faculty members alike. He had a tendency to give
a solemn importance to trivial things and to overlook the great ones;
and there was no mistaking the awed, almost religious fervor with which
he sang the school song--which was, perhaps, only natural, since he had
written it himself.

On that disastrous morning he suddenly burst into a dance as the student
body barrelled into the first chorus. He snatched up the startled girls'
counselor and improvised a little rumba. Slowly the students' voices
fell silent as they watched. Under the sweating leadership of the music
teacher, the school orchestra held the pace for another bar or two,
until one of the players stood up and rendered a discordant hot lick on
his trumpet.

A trio of caretakers carried the struggling principal off the platform
and shouting teachers herded the students on to their next classes.
Thirty