.

Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the
Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and
three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from
the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his
hat to the cool air.

"This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!"

"Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll
have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the
muse!"

The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special
forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased.

"That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid
known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some
day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield--just to be
original."

"And you'll kill the traffic."

"Chain the poet!"

"If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent."

These from half-a-dozen voices at once.

"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper
one for the road to Mayfield--just as you have to have an argumentative
one on the road back."

"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a
sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like
writing paragraphs for English Eight."

"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the
expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog
he knew.

"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"

Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! _A bas_ Mason!" And
then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air
that has split student throats this century long,

"To drive dull care away!"

And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was
singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town
of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.

"Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their
way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier
tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the
rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and
nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective.
Pellams assumed instant control.

"We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening.
Get your places