e tedium of waiting while Maggie was in the kitchen foraging
for food. The game was called "local color," in honor of Patty Wyatt's
famous definition in English class, "Local color is that which makes a
lie seem truthful." The object of the game was to see who could tell the
biggest lie without being found out; and the one rule required that the
victims be disillusionized before they left the table.

Patty was the instigator, the champion player, and the final victim of
the game. Baron Muenchhausen himself would have blushed at some of her
creations, and her stories were told with such an air of ingenuous
honesty that the most outrageous among them obtained credence.

The game in its original conception may have been innocent enough, but
the rule was not always as carefully observed as it should have been,
and the most unaccountable scandals began to float about college. The
president of "Christians" had been called up for cutting chapel. The
shark of the class had flunked her ethics, and even failed to get
through on the "re." Cathy Fair was an own cousin of Professor
Hitchcock's, and called him "Tommy" to his face. These, and far worse,
were becoming public property; and even personal fabrications in regard
to the faculty, intended solely for undergraduate consumption, were
reaching the ears of the faculty themselves.

One day Patty dropped into an under-classman's room on some committee
work, and she found the children, in the manner of their elders,
regaling themselves on dainty bits of college gossip.

"I heard the funniest thing about Professor Winters yesterday," piped
up a sophomore.

"Tell it to us. What was it?" cried a chorus of voices.

"I'd like to hear something funny about Professor Winters; he's the
solemnest-looking man I ever saw," remarked a freshman.

"Well," resumed the sophomore, "it seems he was going to get married
last week, and the invitations were all out, and the presents all there,
when the bride came down with the mumps."

"Really? How funny!" came in a chorus from the delighted auditors.

"Yes--on both sides; and the clergyman had never had it, so the ceremony
had to be postponed."

Patty's blood froze. She recognized the tale. It was one of her own
offspring, only shorn of its unessential adornments.

"Where in the world did you hear any such absurd thing as that?" she
demanded severely.

"I heard Lucille Carter tell it at a fudge party up in Bonnie
Connaught's room last nig