Augustus Cabot chose a school, a select, aristocratic and expensive school near the “Hub of the Universe.”  Thither, in the fall, went Galusha and there he remained until he was eighteen, when he entered Harvard.  At college, as at school, he plugged away at his studies, and he managed to win sufficiently high marks in mathematics.  But his mathematical genius was of a queer twist.  In the practical dollars and cents sort of figuring he was almost worthless.  Money did not interest him at all.  What interested him was to estimate how many bricks there were in “Mem” and how many more there might have been if it had been built a story higher.

“This room,” he said to a classmate, referring to his study in old Thayer, “was built in ——­” naming the year.  “Now allowing that a different fellow lived in it each year, which is fair enough because they almost always change, that means that at least so many fellows,” giving the number, “have occupied this room since the beginning.  That is, provided there was but one fellow living in the room at a time.  Now we know that, for part of the time, this was a double room, so—­”

“Oh, for the love of Mike, Loosh!” exclaimed the classmate, “cut it out.  What do you waste your time doing crazy stunts like that for?”

“But it’s fun.  Say, if they had all cut their initials around on the door frames and the—­ah—­mop boards it would be great stuff to puzzle ’em out and make a list of ’em, wouldn’t it?  I wish they had.”

“Well, I don’t.  It would make the old rat hole look like blazes and it is bad enough as it is.  Come on down and watch the practice.”

One of young Bangs’ peculiar enjoyments, developed during his senior year, was to visit every old cemetery in or about the city and examine and copy the ancient epitaphs and inscriptions.  Pleasant spring afternoons, when normal-minded Harvard men were busy with baseball or track or tennis, or the hundred and one activities which help to keep young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some grass-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death’s-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry.  When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent.  To the few—­the very few—­in whom he confided he made explanations which were as curious as their cause.

“It’s great fun,” he declared.  “It keeps you guessing, that’s it.  Now, for instance, here’s one of those skull jiggers with wings on it.  See?  I traced this over at Copp’s Hill last spring, a year ago.  But there are dozens of ’em all about, in all the old graveyards.  Nobody ever saw a skull with wings; it’s a—­a—­ah—­ convention, of course.  But who made the first one?  And why did it become a convention?  And—­and—­why do some of ’em have wings like this, and some of ’em crossbones like a pirate’s flag, and some of ’em no wings or bones, and why—­”