d
catholicity. Hilary Vane was a trustee, and journeyed more than once to
talk the matter over with the president, who had been his classmate
there.

"I love that boy, Hilary," the president had said at length, when pressed
for a frank opinion,--"there isn't a soul in the place, I believe, that
doesn't,--undergraduates and faculty,--but he has given me more anxious
thought than any scholar I have ever had."

"Trouble," corrected Mr. Vane, sententiously.

"Well, yes, trouble," answered the president, smiling, "but upon my soul,
I think it is all animal spirits."

"A euphemism for the devil," said Hilary, grimly; "he is the animal part
of us, I have been brought up to believe."

The president was a wise man, and took another tack.

"He has a really remarkable mind, when he chooses to use it. Every once
in a while he takes your breath away--but he has to become interested. A
few weeks ago Hays came to me direct from his lecture room to tell me
about a discussion of Austen's in constitutional law. Hays, you know, is
not easily enthused, but he declares your son has as fine a legal brain
as he has come across in his experience. But since then, I am bound to
admit," added the president, sadly, "Austen seems not to have looked at a
lesson."

"'Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,'" replied Hilary.

"He'll sober down," said the president, stretching his conviction a
little, "he has two great handicaps: he learns too easily, and he is too
popular." The president looked out of his study window across the common,
surrounded by the great elms which had been planted when Indian lads
played among the stumps and the red flag of England had flown from the
tall pine staff. The green was covered now with students of a conquering
race, skylarking to and fro as they looked on at a desultory baseball
game. "I verily believe," said the president, "at a word from your son,
most of them would put on their coats and follow him on any mad
expedition that came into his mind."

Hilary Vane groaned more than once in the train back to Ripton. It meant
nothing to him to be the father of the most popular man in college.

"The mad expedition" came at length in the shape of a fight with the
townspeople, in which Austen, of course, was the ringleader. If he had
inherited his mother's eccentricities, he had height and physique from
the Vanes, and one result was a week in bed for the son of the local
plumber and a damage suit against the H