. Dark-haired girl, still holding the
fatal hat-pin, taken in custody, crying hysterically 'When he gave
me his name, I couldn't help it. He's the one who has caused all the
trouble!' Floorwalker reverently covers the body with a cloth, then
looks at the name on the sales slip. 'Gosh,' he cries, aghast, 'it's
Coles Phillips!'"

* * * * *

The gathering broke up, and the five men strolled out into the
blazing August sunshine. The sultry glow of midsummer beat down upon
them, but their thoughts were far away. They were five popular
authors comparing notes on the stories they were writing for the
Christmas magazines.

[Illustration]

IN MEMORIAM
FRANCIS BARTON GUMMERE

I often wonder what inward pangs of laughter or despair he may have
felt as he sat behind the old desk in Chase Hall and watched us
file in, year after year! Callow, juvenile, ignorant, and
cocksure--grotesquely confident of our own manly fulness of worldly
_savoir_--an absurd rabble of youths, miserable flint-heads indeed
for such a steel! We were the most unpromising of all material for
the scholar's eye; comfortable, untroubled middle-class lads most of
us, to whom study was neither a privilege nor a passion, but only a
sober and decent way of growing old enough to enter business.

We did not realize how accurately--and perhaps a trifle grimly--the
strong, friendly face behind the desk was searching us and sizing us
up. He knew us for what we were--a group of nice boys, too sleek,
too cheerfully secure, to show the ambition of the true student.
There was among us no specimen of the lean and dogged crusader of
learning that kindles the eye of the master: no fanatical Scot,
such as rejoices the Oxford or Cambridge don; no liquid-orbed and
hawk-faced Hebrew with flushed cheek bones, such as sets the
pace in the class-rooms of our large universities. No: we were a
hopelessly mediocre, well-fed, satisfied, and characteristically
Quakerish lot. As far as the battle for learning goes, we were
pacifists--conscientious objectors.

It is doubtful whether any really great scholar ever gave the best
years of his life to so meagrely equipped a succession of
youngsters! I say this candidly, and it is well it should be said,
for it makes apparent the true genius of Doctor Gummere's great
gift. He turned this following of humble plodders into lovers and
zealots of the great regions of English letters. There was some