On Monday morning after the exercises in the chapel, Mr. Phelps went to Will’s room and waited till the hour should pass and the eager-hearted boy should return.  As the great clock in the tower rang out the hour he arose and stood in front of the window peering out across the campus at the building where Will was at work, but the stroke had scarcely ceased before he beheld the lad run swiftly down the steps and speed along the pathway toward his room as if he were running for a prize.  The expression in the man’s eyes was soft and there was also a suspicious moisture in them as well as he watched his boy.  Was it only a dream or reality?  Only a few short years ago and he had been an eager-hearted boy speeding over the same pathway (he smiled as he thought how the “speed” was never displayed on his way to the recitation building), and now it was his own boy who was sharing in the life of old Winthrop and doubtless he himself was in the minds of the young students relegated to that remote and distant period when the “old grads” were supposed to be young.  Doubtless to them it was a time as remote as that when Homer’s heroes contended in battle or the fauns and satyrs peopled the wooded hills and plains.  And yet how vital it all was to him.  He watched the groups of students moving across the campus, and as the sound of their shouts or laughter or the words of some song rose on the autumn air, it seemed to the man that he needed only to close his eyes and the old life would return—­a life so like the present that it did not seem possible that a great gulf of thirty years lay between.

Mr. Phelps’ meditations were interrupted by the entrance of Will, who burst into the room with the force of a small whirlwind.

“Here I am, pop!” he exclaimed as he tossed his books upon his couch and threw his cap to the opposite side of the room.  “Old Splinter stuck me good this morning, but I can stand it as long as you are here.”

“Who is Splinter?”

“Why, don’t you know?  I thought everybody knew Splinter.  He’s our professor of Greek and the biggest fraud in the whole faculty.”

“What’s the trouble with him?” Mr. Phelps spoke quietly but there was something in his voice that betrayed a deeper feeling and one that Will was quick to perceive and that gave him a twinge of uneasiness as well.

“Oh, he’s hard as nails.  He must have ‘ichor’ in his veins, not blood.  I don’t believe he ever was a boy.  He must have been like Pallas Athenae.  Wasn’t she the lady that sprang full-fledged from the brain of Zeus?  Well, I’ve a notion that Splinter yelled in Greek when he was a baby.  That is, if he ever was an infant, and called for his bottle in dactylic hexameter.  Oh, I know lots about Greek, pop,” laughed Will as his father smiled.  “I know the alphabet and a whole lot of things even if Splinter thinks I don’t.”

“Doesn’t he think you know much about your Greek?”

“Well, he doesn’t seem to be overburdened with the weight of his opinion of me.  He just looks upon me, I’m afraid, as if I was not a bright and shining light.  ‘Learn Greek or grow up in ignorance,’ that’s the burden of his song, and I’ve sometimes thought that about all the fun he has in life is flunking freshmen.”