say, fellows----"

"Hurray!"

"Good boy!"

"Orator!"

"I say, fellows, I don't see why you've got me up here."

"You don't!"

"We'll show you!"

"Dink, you're the finest ever!"

"You're the stuff!"

"Three cheers for good old Rinky Dink!"

"Fellows, I'm no silver-tongued orator----"

"Don't believe it!"

"You are!"

"Fellows, I haven't got anything to say----"

"That's the stuff!"

"Hurray!"

"Keep it up!"

"Oh, you bulldog!"

"Fellows, they were good----"

A derisive shout went up.

"Fellows, they were very good----"

"Yes, they were!"

"Fellows, they were re-markably good--but _they didn't beat the old
school team_! That's all."

He dove headlong into the crowd, unaware that he had repeated for the
sixth time the stock oration of the evening.

"Good old Dink! Good old Rinky Dink!"

The cry stuck in his memory all through the jubilant night and long
after, when in his delicious bed he tossed and worried over the
tackles he had missed.

"It's a bully nickname--bully!" he repeated drowsily, again and again.
"It sounds as though they liked you! And Tough McCarty, what a bully
chap--bully! We're going to be friends--pals--what a bully fellow!
Everything is bully--everything!"

* * * * *

With the close of the football season and the advent of December, with
its scurries of snow and sleet, what might be termed the open season
for masters began.

A school of four hundred fellows is a good deal like a shaky monarchy:
the football and baseball seasons akin to foreign wars; so long as
they last the tranquillity of the state is secure, but with the return
of peace a state of fermentation and unrest is due.

The three weeks that lead to the Christmas vacation are too filled
with anticipation to be dangerous. It is the long reaches after
January fifth, the period of arctic night that settles down until the
passing of the muddy month of March, that tries the souls of the
keepers of these caged menageries.

Since those days a humane direction has built a gymnasium to lighten
the condition of servitude, preserve the health and prolong the lives
of the Faculty. But at this time, with the shutting of the door on the
treadmills of exercise, the young assistant master arranged his warm
wrapper and slippers at the side of his bed and went to sleep with one
ear raised.

Dink Stover entered this season of mischief with all the ardor and
intensity of his nature, the mor