. He made up his mind that
he liked him still better when Turner said:

"None of the fellows call me Terrible Turner, you know--that was just
some bunk that Bassett invented. They all call me Snubby--on account of
my nose, I guess."

That noon an incident occurred that some of the roomers in Gannett Hall
noticed: just before lunch Teeny-bits' trunk came. Mr. Holbrook brought
it up from the village in a buggy drawn by a sorrel horse and with
Teeny-bits' help carried it to the room on the third floor. Several of
the boys remembered seeing Mr. Holbrook in the Hamilton station and when
Teeny-bits introduced him as his father they suddenly realized that the
conqueror of Whirlwind Bassett and the bearer of the queer nickname was
the son of the station agent and a native of the little hamlet that
nestled at the foot of the hill.

Mr. Holbrook was white-haired and he walked with a slight limp that made
him seem old. He looked at Teeny-bits' new friends with a kindly twinkle
in his eyes and told them that they were all "lucky boys to go to such a
fine school" and advised them to "study hard so as to be smart men." If
he had not been Teeny-bits' father, they might have thought he was a
queer old duffer.

When Mr. Holbrook had said good-by to Teeny-bits he went over to Doctor
Wells' office and remained alone with the Head for half an hour. At the
end of that time he came out and drove the old sorrel horse through the
campus and down the hill toward the village. One or two of the boys who
saw him wondered what he had been talking about so long with the Head.

Old Daniel Holbrook with the limp and the white hair meant every word
that he had said about the boys being lucky to go to such a fine school,
but he meant it particularly in the case of Teeny-bits, whose situation
in life was entirely different from the situation of most of the other
Ridgleyites. They came to Ridgley from half the states in the
Union--from California and Ohio and the Carolinas and New York and New
England--they came well-equipped and carried themselves with a manner
that suggested the well-to-do homes they had left. Teeny-bits Holbrook
was there because he had won the scholarship that under the terms of the
endowment of the school was awarded each year to a public-school student
who lived within the confines of Sherburne County. Fennimore Ridgley,
whose coal mines had yielded the fortune with which he had founded the
school on the hill above the village