ying for me after
the service and praying with me. Of course I wanted to be saved, but I
didn't want to be saved quite so publicly.

When a boy's had a good mother he's got a good conscience, and when he's
got a good conscience he don't need to have right and wrong labeled for
him. Now that your Ma's left and the apron strings are cut, you're
naturally running up against a new sensation every minute, but if you'll
simply use a little conscience as a tryer, and probe into a thing which
looks sweet and sound on the skin, to see if you can't fetch up a sour
smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.

[Illustration: "_Old Doc Hoover asked me right out in Sunday School if I
didn't want to be saved._"]

I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious that
you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound
conscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in your
Latin. There are two parts of a college education--the part that you get
in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outside
of it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the first
can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man.

Education's a good deal like eating--a fellow can't always tell which
particular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did him
harm. After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
and watermelon, you can't say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
but you don't have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
a fellow can't figure out to an ounce whether it's Latin or algebra or
history or what among the solids that is building him up in this place
or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they're
not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It's down among the sweets,
among his amusements and recreations, that he's going to find his
stomach-ache, and it's there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
choose.

It's not the first half, but the second half of a college education
which merchants mean when they ask if a college education pays. It's the
Willie and the Bertie boys; the chocolate eclair and tutti-frutti boys;
the la-de-dah and the baa-baa-billy-goat boys; the high cock-a-lo-rum
and the cock-a-doodle-do boys; the Bah J