do. I
guess he wouldn't be so light and airy about it!"

"You'll go down and let him help you, though, won't you?" asked Tom
anxiously.

"Oh, I suppose so. He can do the whole thing if he wants to. Where is my
dictionary?"

With Mr. Daley's help, freely offered and grudgingly accepted, Steve
weathered that crisis. And secretly he was grateful to the Hall Master,
though he still pretended to believe and possibly did half believe that
the latter was a sort of mollycoddle. Tom told him indignantly once that
since Mr. Daley had been so awfully decent to him he ought to stop
poking fun at him. To which Steve cheerfully made answer that even a
mollycoddle could be decent at times!

Brimfield played Canterbury High School on a Wednesday afternoon in
early October and had a good deal of a scare. Canterbury romped on to
the field like a bunch of young colts, and continued to romp for the
best part of three ten-minute periods, long after Brimfield had decided
that romping was no longer in good taste! Led by a small, wiry,
red-headed quarter-back, who was likewise captain, and directed from the
side-line by a coach who looked scarcely older than the big youth who
played centre for them, the Canterbury team took the most astounding
liberties with football precedents. They didn't transgress the rules,
but they put such original interpretations on some of them that Mr.
Conklin, who was refereeing, and Mr. Jordan, instructor in mathematics,
who was umpiring, had their heads over the rules-book nearly half the
time! Now and then they would march to the side-line and consult the
Canterbury coach. "Where do you get your authority for that play?" Mr.
Conklin would ask a trifle irritably. Thereupon, silently but with a
twinkle in his eye, the coach would gravely take the book, flip the
pages, lay a finger on a section and return it.

"Hm," Mr. Conklin would say. "Hm; but that seems to be in direct
contradiction of another rule over here!"

"Quite likely," the coach would reply indifferently. "There are quite a
few contradictions there. Of course, you may accept either rule you
like, gentlemen."

Disarmed in such wise, the officials invariably decided the play to be
legal, and Quarter-back Milton, of Brimfield, would protest volubly and
get very, very red in the face in his attempt to carry his point and, at
the same time, omit none of the respect due a faculty member! It was
hard on Milton, that game, and several times he nearly