or
studies in electrical science, and second that we grant him the degree
of Doctor of Letters. Those are his terms." "Can we meet them?"

"Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty, of course; as to
the degree, it's only a question of getting the faculty to vote it. I
think we can manage it."

* * * * *

Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members of the
faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than
whispered, in the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would
ever have been conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment
the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational
crises which from time to time shake a university to its base. The
meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum
in the excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the
head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them
amounted practically to a revolution. The proposal was nothing less
than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink
in the sessional examinations of the university. Anyone conversant with
the inner life of a college will realize that to many of the
professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of
socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society. They must
fight it back or die on the walls. To others it was one more step in
the splendid progress of democratic education, comparable only to such
epoch-making things as the abandonment of the cap and gown, and the
omission of the word "sir" in speaking to a professor.

No wonder that the fight raged. Elderberry Foible, his fluffed white
hair almost on end, beat in vain with his gavel for order. Finally,
Chang of Physiology, who was a perfect dynamo of energy and was known
frequently to work for three or four hours at a stretch, proposed that
the faculty should adjourn the question and meet for its further
discussion on the following Saturday morning. This revolutionary
suggestion, involving work on Saturday, reduced the meeting to a mere
turmoil, in the midst of which Elderberry Foible proposed that the
whole question of the use of lead-pencils should be adjourned till that
day six months, and that meantime a new special committee of seventeen
professors, with power to add to their number, to call witnesses and,
if need be, to hear them, should report on the entire matter _de nov