e been.
When cross-questioned he would decline to answer; it was a trick he had.
Now Tristrem never got into difficulties, except with Latin prosody or a
Greek root, and he was frank to a fault.

It so happened that one day the headmaster summoned Tristrem to him. "My
dear," he said, "Royal is not acting quite as he should, is he?" To this
Tristrem made no reply. "He is a motherless boy," the master continued,
"a poor motherless boy. I wish, Tristrem, that you would use your
influence with him. I see but one course open to me, unless he does
better--" Tristrem was a motherless boy himself, but he answered bravely
that he would do what he could. That evening, as he was battling with
the platitudes of that Augustan bore who is called the Bard of Mantua,
presumably because he was born in Andes--Weldon came in, smelling of
tobacco and drink. It was evident that he had been to town.

Tristrem looked up from his task, and as he looked he heard the step of
a tutor in the hall. He knew, if the tutor had speech with Weldon, that
on the morrow Weldon would leave the school. In a second he had seated
him before the open dictionary, and in another second he was kneeling at
his own bedside. Hardly had he bowed his head when there came a rap at
the door, the tutor entered, saw the kneeling figure, apologized in a
whisper, and withdrew.

When Tristrem stood up again, Weldon was sobered and very pale.
"Tristrem--" he began, but Tristrem interrupted him. "There, don't say
anything, and don't do it again. To-morrow you had better talk it over
with the doctor."

Weldon declined to talk it over with anyone, but after that he behaved
himself with something approaching propriety. Two years later, in
company with his friend, he entered Harvard, from which institution he
was subsequently dropped.

Tristrem meanwhile struggled through the allotted four years. He was not
brilliant in his studies, the memorizing of abstruse questions and
recondite problems was not to his liking. He preferred modern tongues to
dead languages, an intricate fugue was more to his taste than the
simplest equation, and to his shame it must be noted that he read
Petrarch at night. But, though the curriculum was not entirely to his
fancy, he was conscientious and did his best. There are answers that he
gave in class that are quoted still, tangential flights that startled
the listeners into new conceptions of threadbare themes, totally
different from the usual cut a