was optional, but it kept up in the most gratifying way, and sometimes on a Friday the little assembly-room would be quite filled with the frankly admiring lads.  “Why should I mind the little annoyances,” would flash into his mind as he rose to speak, “when I can look down into a lot of fine, loyal young faces like this. Here is what counts.”  His appearance at student gatherings was always attended by an ovation.  He loved to hear the old Blaines cheer, with three ringing “Prexy’s” tacked on the end.  One Saturday in early April, Prexy took Miss Avery to a baseball game, somewhat against her will, solely that she might see how his students worshiped him.  On the following Saturday, all with even-handed liberality, he took Miss Weyland to another baseball game, with the same delightful purpose.

The spring found West stronger and more contented with his lot as president of a jerkwater college, decidedly happier for the burning out of the fires of hot ambition which had consumed his soul six months earlier.  He told himself that he was reconciled to a slow advance with fighting every inch of the way.  But he saw the uselessness of fighting trustees who were doomed soon to fall, and resigned himself to a quiet, in fact a temporarily suspended, programme of progress.  And then, just when everything seemed most comfortably serene, a new straw suddenly appeared in the wind, which quickly multiplied into a bundle and then a bale, and all at once the camel’s back had more than it could bear.  April was hardly dead before the college world was in a turmoil, by the side of which the Young affair was the mere buzzing of a gnat.

History is full of incidents of the kind:  incidents which are trifling beyond mention in the beginning, but which malign circumstance distorts and magnifies till they set nations daggers-drawn at each other’s throats.  Two students lured a “freshman” to their room and there invited him to drink a marvelous compound the beginnings of which were fat pork and olive oil; this while standing on his head.  The freshman did not feel in a position to deny their request.  But his was a delicate stomach, and the result of his accommodating spirit was that he became violently, though not seriously, ill.  Thus the matter came to the attention of his parents, and so to the college authorities.  The sick lad stoutly declined to tell who were his persecutors, but West managed to track one of them down and summoned him to his office.  We may call this student Brown; a pleasant-mannered youth of excellent family, whose sister West sometimes danced with at the Thursday German.  Brown said that he had, indeed, been present during the sad affair, that he had, in fact, to his eternal humiliation and regret, aided and abetted it; but he delicately hinted that the prime responsibility rested on the shoulders of the other student.  Rather unwisely, perhaps, West pressed him to disclose the name of his collaborator. (Brown afterwards, to