ike," said
Bojo to turn the conversation. On the walls were a hundred mementoes of
school and college, while a couple of lounges and several great chairs
were indolently grouped about the fireplace, where a fire was laid. "I
say, Roscy, has the infant really been behaving?"

"Well, we haven't bailed, him out yet," said Marsh meditatingly.

Fred DeLancy had been in trouble all his life and out of it as easily.
Trouble, as he himself expressed it, woke up the moment he went out. He
had been suspended and threatened with expulsion for one scrape after
another more times than he could remember. But there was something that
instantly disarmed anger in the odd star-pointing nose, the twinkly
eyes, and the wide mouth set at a perpetual grin. One way or another he
wriggled through regions where angels fear to tread, assisted by much
painful effort on the part of his friends.

"I'm getting frightfully serious," he said with mock contrition. "I'm
getting to be an old man; the cares of life and all that sort of stuff."

He broke off and flung himself at the piano, where he started an
improvisation:

"The cares of life,
This dreadful strife,
I'll take a wife--
No, change the rhyme
I haven't time
For matrimony--O!
Leave that to handsome Bojo
Bojo's in love,
Blush like a dove--

"No, doves don't blush," he said, swinging around. "Do they or don't
they? Anyhow, a dove in love might-- To continue:

"Bojo's in love,
Blush like a dove,
Won't tell her name,
I'll guess the same--"

But at this moment, just as a pillow came hurtling through the air, the
doorway was ruled with a great body and George Granning came crowding
into the room, hand out, a smile on his honest, open face.

"Hello, Tom, it's good to see you again."

"The government can go on," said DeLancy joyfully. "We're here!"

As the four sat grouped about the room they presented one of those
strange combinations of friendship which could only result from the
process of American education. Four more dissimilar individualities
could not have been molded together except by the curious selective
processes of an academic society system. The Big Four, as they had been
dubbed (there is always a Big Four in every school and college), had
come from Andover linked by the closest ties, and this intimacy had
never relaxed, despite all the incongruous opposition of their
beginnings.

Marsh was a New Yorker, an aristocrat by inheritance and by f