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. Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his hat to the cool air. "This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!" "Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the muse!" The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased. "That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield--just to be original." "And you'll kill the traffic." "Chain the poet!" "If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent." These from half-a-dozen voices at once. "Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield--just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back." "Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight." "It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew. "How would Jimmie's sore-head do?" Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! _A bas_ Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long, "To drive dull care away!" And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus. "Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective. Pellams assumed instant control. "We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening. Get your places
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