and looking
round Maud saw Fanny in the big chair, cooking her feet over the
register.

"I never saw him there; he sent up some books one day, and Will teased
her about it."

"What did she do?" demanded Fanny. "Oh, she shook him."

"What a spectacle!" and Tom looked as if he would have enjoyed seeing
it, but Fanny's face grew so forbidding, that Tom's little dog, who was
approaching to welcome her, put his tail between his legs and fled under
the table.

"Then there is n't any 'Sparking Sunday night'?" sung Tom, who appeared
to have waked up again.

"Of course not. Polly is n't going to marry anybody; she 's going to
keep house for Will when he 's a minister, I heard her say so," cried
Maud, with importance.

"What a fate for pretty Polly!" ejaculated Tom.

"She likes it, and I 'm sure I should think she would; it 's beautiful
to hear 'em plan it all out."

"Any more gossip to retail, Pug?" asked Tom a minute after, as Maud
seemed absorbed in visions of the future.

"He told a funny story about blowing up one of the professors. You
never told us, so I suppose you did n't know it. Some bad fellow put a
torpedo, or some sort of powder thing, under the chair, and it went off
in the midst of the lesson, and the poor man flew up, frightened most
to pieces, and the boys ran with pails of water to put the fire out. But
the thing that made Will laugh most was, that the very fellow who did it
got his trousers burnt trying to put out the fire, and he asked the is
it Faculty or President?"

"Either will do," murmured Tom, who was shaking with suppressed
laughter.

"Well, he asked 'em to give him some new ones, and they did give him
money enough, for a nice pair; but he got some cheap ones, with horrid
great stripes on 'em, and always wore 'em to that particular class,
'which was one too many for the fellows,' Will said, and with the rest
of the money he had a punch party. Was n't it dreadful?"

"Awful!" And Tom exploded into a great laugh, that made Fanny cover her
ears, and the little dog bark wildly.

"Did you know that bad boy?" asked innocent Maud.

"Slightly," gasped Tom, in whose wardrobe at college those identical
trousers were hanging at that moment.

"Don't make such a noise, my head aches dreadfully," said Fanny,
fretfully.

"Girls' heads always do ache," answered Tom, subsiding from a roar into
a chuckle.

"What pleasure you boys can find in such ungentlemanly things, I don't
see," said Fanny, w