m on Baldpate Mountain, with a
perforation in my hat."
Mr. Bland shivered. "I'm going back to bed," he said in disgust.
"First," went on the gentleman with the perforated derby, "permit me to
introduce myself. I am Professor Thaddeus Bolton, and I hold the Chair
of Comparative Literature in a big eastern university."
Mr. Magee took the mittened hand of the professor.
"Glad to see you, I'm sure," he said. "My name is Magee. This is Mr.
Bland--he is impetuous but estimable. I trust you will forgive his first
salute. What's a bullet among gentlemen? It seems to me that as
explanations may be lengthy and this room is very cold, we would do well
to go up to my room, where there is a fire."
"Delighted," cried the old man. "A fire. I long to see one. Let us go to
your room, by all means."
Mr. Bland sulkily stalked to his mattress and secured a gaily colored
bed quilt, which he wound about his thin form.
"This is positively the last experience meeting I attend to-night," he
growled.
They ascended to number seven. Mr. Magee piled fresh logs on the fire;
Mr. Bland saw to it that the door was not tightly closed. The professor
removed, along with other impedimenta, his ear tabs, which were
connected by a rubber cord. He waved them like frisky detached ears
before him.
"An old man's weakness," he remarked. "Foolish, they may seem to you.
But I assure you I found them useful companions in climbing Baldpate
Mountain at this hour."
He sat down in the largest chair suite seven owned, and from its depths
smiled benignly at the two young men.
"But I am not here to apologize for my apparel, am I? Hardly. You are
saying to yourselves 'Why is he here?' Yes, that is the question that
disturbs you. What has brought this domesticated college professor
scampering from the Pagan Renaissance to Baldpate Inn? For answer, I
must ask you to go back with me a week's time, and gaze at a picture
from the rather dreary academic kaleidoscope that is my life.
"I am seated back of a desk on a platform in a bare yellow room. In
front of me, tier on tier, sit a hundred young men in various attitudes
of inattention. I am trying to tell them something of the ideal poetry
that marked the rebirth of the Saxon genius. They are bored. I--well,
gentlemen, in confidence, even the mind of a college professor has been
known to wander at times from the subject in hand. And then--I begin to
read a poem--a poem descriptive of a woman dead six hu
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