Will Phelps had regularly attended the services, not only because such attendance was required by the college authorities but also from the habit and inclination of his own life.  With his fellows he had enjoyed some speakers and had disliked others in his thoughtless manner, and in the preceding week had laughed as heartily as any one over the unconscious escapade of Mott.  The preacher for the day had been unusually prosy, having length without much breadth or thickness as Foster had dryly described the discourse, and in the midst of the hour, Mott had fallen asleep in his pew.  Short and stout in figure, doubtless doubly wearied by the late hours he had kept the preceding night, in the midst of his slumbers he had begun to snore.  From low and peaceful intonations he had passed on to long, prolonged, and sonorous notes that could be heard throughout the college chapel.  Nor would any one of his fellows disturb his slumbers, and when at last with an unusually loud and agonizing gasp Mott was awakened and suddenly sat erect and stared stupidly about him, the good-hearted, but boyishly irreverent audience, it is safe to affirm, was decidedly more interested in the slumbering sophomore than in the soporific speaker, though few doubtless thought them related as cause and effect.

On the following Sunday Will was thinking of Mott’s experience and wondering if he would give another exhibition.  This thought was even in his mind when the visiting speaker entered the chapel pulpit and reverently began the service of the day.

He had not been speaking long before it was evident that every eye was fastened upon him.  It was evident that here was first of all a man, and then a man who was present because he had something to say and not merely because he had to say something.

“I am appealing to those of you,” he was saying, “who are eager and earnest, not to you who are indifferent or weaklings.  Those of you who are members of your college teams, who are leading spirits in the college life, who are not living lives that are above reproach because you have no temptation to be bad, but because if you do right it is because you have to struggle and fight for it—­it is to you I am speaking this morning.”

Will was listening intently, as was every one in the chapel, and then there followed a sentence that seemed to him almost electric with life and that made a lasting impression upon his life.

CHAPTER XXII

A FRESH EXCITEMENT

“What I want every one of you young men to do,” the speaker was saying, “is to give your better self a chance.  There isn’t one of you to-day who is not proud of his physical strength, not one of you who, if he should be urged to join one of the athletic teams, would not willingly, even proudly go through all the training that would be required of him.  And that is right.  In your intellectual work some of you see what the desired end is—­the