nce. He went
home to his bleak little room in a resolute mood. He sat down at his
table upon which lay his algebra, determined to prepare Monday's
lessons, but the pencil fell from his hand, his head sank down and lay
upon the open page before him. Wood sawing had worn him down and
algebra had made him sleep.

V.

BRADLEY RISES TO ADDRESS THE CARTHAGINIANS.

He was now facing another terror, the Friday afternoon recitals, in
which alternate sections of the pupils were obliged to appear before
the public in the chapel to recite or read an essay. It was an ordeal
that tried the souls of the bravest of them all.

Unquestionably it kept many pupils away. Nothing could be more terrible
to a shrinking awkward boy or girl from a farm than this requirement,
to stand upon a raised platform with nothing to break the effect of
sheer crucifixion. It was appalling. It was a pillory, a stake, a
burning, and yet there was a fearful fascination about it, and it was
doubtful if a majority of the students would have voted for its
abolition. The preps and juniors saw the seniors winning electrical
applause from the audience and fancied the same prize was within their
reach. There was no surer or more instant success to be won than that
which followed a splendid oratorical effort on the platform. It was
worth the cost.

Each new-comer dreaded it for weeks and talked about it constantly.
Bradley, like all the rest before him, could not eat a thing on the
morning preceding his trial, and in fact had suffered a distinct loss
of appetite from the middle of the week.

Mary Barber, a tall, awkward, badly-dressed girl, met him as he was
going up the steps after the first bell.

"Say, how you feelin'! I've shook all the mornin'. I don't know what
I'm goin' to do. I'm just sick."

"Why don't you say so an' get off?" Bradley suggested.

"Because that's what I did last time, and it won't work any more." The
poor girl's teeth were chattering with her fright. She laughed at
herself in an hysterical way, and wrung her hands, as if with cold, and
dropped back into the broadest kind of dialect. "Oh, I feel 'sif my
stomach was all gone."

Nettie Russell regarded it all as merely another disagreeable duty to
be shirked. Nothing troubled her very much. "You just wait and see how
I get out of it," she said, as she passed by. At two o'clock the
principal came in, and removed even the small pulpit, so that nothing
should stand between the