d in and told me the old boy was coming up the street. I
smelt danger and tumbled into bed like a six-day bicyclist, and fixed my
face up with some grease paint and magnesia. Sure enough, he came in,
darkly suspicious, thought he had me all right, but he found a wreck
that melted him. His wife sent me a bunch of violets next morning. For
my part I don't like the Faculty for intimate friends," and Pellams
played "Comrades" with the soft pedal down.

"It's not the same thing, though, really," persisted Shirlock. "They may
come over here to dinner or perhaps to a smoker, but it's always
Professor So-and-So; his chair is a little higher than any of yours, and
he never forgets the family waiting for him in the Row; in those first
days the family was in most cases beyond the Rockies, or as yet a dream,
and it wasn't always easy to pick out the professor from the jumble of
story-tellers on the bed.

"Of course, it was all too good to last," the alumnus went on
thoughtfully, "and it wasn't natural it should. We weren't so many then.
When the number increased, I suppose the relations had to change and the
different cliques must separate. I'll admit that there is more in the
life now, it's more complex, there are more institutions and more ways
of having joy; but those were good old days, those first days in Encina
when the crowd was one.

"I can see them now, can't you, Harry? out on the veranda and the steps
of the Hall after dinner, with the fellows playing ball on the lawn, and
other men sitting up on their window-ledges. The night I started to tell
you about, when we went to serenade Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, we got the
mandolin fellows, the beginning of your present club, and fell in
behind them and started off down the road, past the mausoleum and
through the vineyard--never broke ranks there, either, we were on our
good behavior, besides, it was Spring--and so on over to the house,
where we drew up, and the mandolins played their piece, then we gave the
yell--it was only a few months old, that yell, but it had been loud
enough to knock out a twenty-five-year-old one we met up in town not
long before, and we were proud of it.

"During the pause that followed, the front door opened and the Senator
stepped out on the porch; a lamp shone on his gray head and on us
fellows in a big black crowd on the gravel below, looking up at him and
cheering. When we stopped he said, very much as though a friend had
driven up, "Gentlemen,