wrote to Fairport, Doctor Russell? I
guess you must be."

"Yes, I wrote to Fairport," said Russell.

"Well, I hope you liked the barrel we sent, and the boxes. They were
going to send them to another place, but your letter decided us. That's
my church, you know, which sent them. And, for that matter, it was your
letter first turned my father's attention to investing in your part of
the country. Oh, tell me, where did that tea go? My mother _would_ send
her best London mixture--"

"Was it your mother?" Robbins spoke. With a red face and a flash of his
eyes at the sullen group about him, he withdrew his chair, making a
clear passage to the stove. "I'd like to thank her, then, and her son
for her; that tea and that quince jam--whose was the quince jam?"

"I rather think my mother put that in, too."

"Well, it almost cured my wife; it was better than medicine, that and
the tea, for, not to mention that we couldn't get any medicine, it put
heart into her as medicine couldn't. I wonder was it your mother, or who
was it put in that volume of college songs? _I_ got that. You wouldn't
think it, but I'm a university man--Harvard--"

The young fellow caught his hand and gripped it hard. "Harvard? So am
I--Martin Wallace, '92."

"My name is George Robbins, and I'm a good deal farther back; and, as
you can see, I'm down on my luck. But there's no need going into my
hard-luck story; it's like a lot of our stories here. You see where we
are--hardly shoes to our feet; not because we have been shiftless or
idle, or have wronged anybody; yet the cutthroats and thieves in the
penitentiary have had better fare and suffered less with cold and hunger
than we have. And it's not that we are fools, either; we're not
uneducated. There are at least three other college men in our community;
there's Doc Russell--"

"I _am_," drawled Russell; "much good it's done me; but I won honors at
the University of Iowa."

"I didn't win any honors, but I went to the State University--was
graduated there before I went to Harvard. But--you aren't Teddy Russell,
Teddy Russell of the Glee Club and the football eleven?"

"Yes, I am Teddy Russell."

"E. D. Russell, of course; why didn't I guess? You were there two years
before me, but I daresay they are talking of you still; and the way you
won a touchdown with a broken rib on you, and the time all the rest of
the Glee Club missed the train at Fairport, going to Lone Tree, and you
went on with the ban