sfied, for instance, as you are."

[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-MASTER AS A COOLER]

"No," observed the School-master, "you cannot raise grapes on a thistle
farm. Any unbiassed observer looking around this table," he added, "and
noting Mr. Whitechoker, a graduate of Yale; the Bibliomaniac, a son of
dear old Harvard; the Doctor, an honor man of Williams; our legal friend
here, a graduate of Columbia--to say nothing of myself, who was
graduated with honors at Amherst--any unbiassed observer seeing these, I
say, and then seeing you, wouldn't take very long to make up his mind as
to whether a man is better off or not for having had a collegiate
training."

"There I must again dispute your assertion," returned the Idiot. "The
unbiassed person of whom you speak would say, 'Here is this gray-haired
Amherst man, this book-loving Cambridge boy of fifty-seven years of age,
the reverend graduate of Yale, class of '55, and the other two learned
gentlemen of forty-nine summers each, and this poor ignoramus of an
Idiot, whose only virtue is his modesty, all in the same box.' And then
he would ask himself, 'In what way have these sons of Amherst, Yale,
Harvard, and so forth, the better of the unassuming Idiot?'"

"The same box?" said the Bibliomaniac. "What do you mean by that?"

"Just what I say," returned the Idiot. "The same box. All boarding, all
eschewing luxuries of necessity, all paying their bills with difficulty,
all sparsely clothed; in reality, all keeping Lent the year through.
'Verily,' he would say, 'the Idiot has the best of it, for he is
young.'"

And leaving them chewing the cud of reflection, the Idiot departed.

"I thought they were going to land you that time," said the genial
gentleman who occasionally imbibed, later; "but when I heard you use the
word 'sciolism,' I knew you were all right. Where did you get it?"

"My chief got it off on me at the office the other day. I happened in a
mad moment to try to unload some of my original observations on him
apropos of my getting to the office two hours late, in which it was my
endeavor to prove to him that the truly safe and conservative man was
always slow, and so apt to turn up late on occasions. He hopped about
the office for a minute or two, and then he informed me that I was an
18-karat sciolist. I didn't know what he meant, and so I looked it up."

"And what did he mean?"

"He meant that I took the cake for superficiality, and I guess he was
right," replie