t had written this while he was in London two hundred years
before, a great man among great men. With such authority back of him
Litton returned to his empty class-room feeling as proud as Gulliver in
Lilliput. A little later he was Gulliver in Brobdingnag.

Alone at his desk, with none of his students in the seats before him, he
took from his pocket--his left pocket--a photograph of Prof. Martha
Binley. It had been taken one day on a picnic far from the spying eyes
of pupils. Her hair was all wind-blown, her eyes frowned gleamingly into
the sun, and her mouth was curled with laughter.

He sat there alone--the learned professor--and talked to this snapshot
in a dialogue he would have recently accepted as a perfect examination
paper for matriculation in an insane-asylum.

"Well, Margy-wargy, zoo and Stookie-tookie is dust like old Dean
Swiffikins, isn't we?"

There was a rap on the door and the knob turned as he shot the
photograph into his pocket and pretended to be reading a volume of
Bacchylides--upside down. The intruder was Teed. Litton was too much
startled and too throbbing with guilt to express his indignation. He
stammered:

"We-well, Teed?" He almost called him teed-leums, his tongue had so
caught the rhythm of love.

Teed came forward with an ominous self-confidence bordering on
insolence. There was a glow in his eye that made his former tyrant
quail.

"Professor, I'd like a word with you about those conditions. I wish
you'd let me off on 'em."

"Let you off, T-Teed?"

"Yes, sir. I can't get ready for the exams. I've boned until my skull's
cracked and it lets the blamed stuff run out faster than I can cram it
in. The minute I leave college I expect to forget everything I've
learned here, anyway; so I'd be ever so much obliged if you'd just pass
me along."

"I don't think I quite comprehend," said Litton, who was beginning to
regain his pedagogical dignity.

"All you've gotta do," said Teed, "is to put a high enough mark on my
papers. You gimme a special examination and I'll make the best stab I
can at answering the questions; then you just shut one eye and mark it
just over the failure line. That'll save you a lot o' time and fix me
hunky-dory."

Litton was glaring at him, hearing the uncouth "gimme" and "gotta," and
wondering that a man could spend four years in college and scrape off
so little paint. Then he began to realize the meaning of Teed's
proposal. His own honor was in traffic. He gr