re voices gives place to silence broken only by the
rapid calling of the rolls and the prompt "here"--"here," in response.

If ever there was a pet in the corps of cadets he lived in the person of
Billy McKay. Bright as one of his own buttons; jovial, generous,
impulsive; he had only one enemy in the battalion,--and that one, as he
had been frequently told, was himself. This, however, was a matter which
he could not at all be induced to believe. Of the Academic Board in
general, of his instructors in large measure, but of the four or five
ill-starred soldiers known as "tactical officers" in particular, Mr.
McKay entertained very decided and most unflattering opinions. He had
won his cadetship through rigid competitive examination against all
comers; he was a natural mathematician of whom a professor had said that
he "_could_ stand in the fives and _wouldn't_ stand in the forties;"
years of his boyhood spent in France had made him master of the
colloquial forms of the court language of Europe, yet a dozen classmates
who had never seen a French verb before their admission stood above him
at the end of the first term. He had gone to the first section like a
rocket and settled to the bottom of it like a stick. No subject in the
course was really hard to him, his natural aptitude enabling him to
triumph over the toughest problems. Yet he hated work, and would often
face about with an empty black-board and take a zero and a report for
neglect of studies that half an hour's application would have rendered
impossible. Classmates who saw impending danger would frequently make
stolen visits to his room towards the close of the term and profess to
be baffled by the lesson for the morrow, and Billy would promptly knock
the ashes out of the pipe he was smoking contrary to regulations and lay
aside the guitar on which he had been softly strumming--also contrary to
regulations; would pick up the neglected calculus or mechanics; get
interested in the work of explanation, and end by having learned the
lesson in spite of himself. This was too good a joke to be kept a
secret, and by the time the last year came Billy had found it all out
and refused to be longer hoodwinked.

There was never the faintest danger of his being found deficient in
studies, but there was ever the glaring prospect of his being discharged
"on demerit." Mr. McKay and the regulations of the United States
Military Academy had been at loggerheads from the start.

And