be scorned
as a guesser in reading Caesar at sight. He was not openly
religious--which kept him out of the Y. M. C. A. But, on the other hand,
in a quiet way, he deeply loved the out of doors, and that love, like
all love, is a kind of worship of God. Harrington was unquestionably
"hard to place." The boys as well as the masters, when they spoke about
him at all, agreed on that. The only pigeon-hole into which he seemed to
fit was the pigeon-hole of the "Queer Dicks." His first name happened
to be Richard, which helped to settle the classification.

Burton passed through the West Wing, being a Sixth Former, with a room
on the top floor of the New Building, and, chewing his lips, crossed the
wide level lawn--with its strip of bright green grass that showed where
the hot water pipes ran--and disappeared through a door in the western
end.

Harrington did not go to his room. Young men who get demerits were not
privileged at The Towers to study in their own rooms. They spent periods
not occupied with recitations in the school room, a long room containing
some two hundred desks, with a raised platform and an organ at the
southern end; the place had once been used as the school chapel and was
still used for the morning song-service which enlivened the daily grind.
Plaster busts of the great of all ages, from Homer to Longfellow, peered
from their plaster brackets. There was a verse also on the southern
walls:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man:
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The Youth replies, I can.

Dick Harrington didn't like that verse. In fact, he thought it was rot.
He disliked even more the black tablets on the opposite wall containing
in gilt letters at least four inches high the names of the exemplary
youths who in their time had been Heads of School. And in this place,
surrounded by Models of Good Conduct, he was supposed to study four,
five and sometimes six hours a day! Two hundred bent forms and Mr.
Watrous, the day's jail-keeper, wandering aimlessly about, pretending
not to be the spy that he was! Altogether, the schoolroom was a horror.

Harrington bent over his desk like the rest and pretended to study
French. But he did not study. He did a little mathematical problem
instead. Twenty demerits and thirty demerits made fifty demerits. And
fifty demerits meant probation, and probation meant that he could not go
to Chancellor's Hill to see the