of school that he would not be with us in the next year.

I felt somehow that I would have liked to say goodby to him, but I was
afraid that he would ask me why I, in his absence on that terrible day,
had not prevented Geoghen from doing what he did--and my conscience made
a coward of me. I had a foolish idea, besides, that he did not like me.
Any man who cared so much for his religion would not be able to respect
a boy in my position. It was all very unfortunate--I was sorry for him,
to be sure--but I must not sympathize too much with him.

I told my aunt of the affair, of course, and she shuddered with
distaste.

"What a fearful lot of ruffians they must be!" she sighed. "And worst of
all, a Russian Jew for a teacher!"

I spent the summer at a Y. M. C. A. camp on the Maine coast. There were
no other Jewish boys there, but my aunt had managed to have me placed on
the roll-call somehow. I was glad enough of it. I did not want another
summer at a fashionable hotel in her and other ladies' company.

Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the camp. They were a good,
rough-and-ready sort who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking songs
on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew brown and muscle-bound and manly.
Such teasing as I had from them was good-natured, and I suppose I should
have taken it in the same spirit. But I had none of their assurance, was
like a stranger in a strange land--and came out of the summer with a
still deeper shrinking from contact with other boys.

High school began again, went on and on from lagging month to month, and
soon enough was over for a second year. But this time my aunt had been
as much aroused as she could be to the baffling condition of my mind and
spirits. I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I had learned to
bear it with greater patience, but it still galled and depressed me.

Only, after that evening when I stood outside the synagogue, I had some
dim conception of what the inevitable cure would have to be.

At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve specialist a second time. He
insisted that I must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the unsympathetic
quality of our home life.

This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. She had now a legitimate
excuse for shipping me off to a fashionable boarding school of some
sort. For days she made a feverish study of monogrammed and
photogravured catalogues from various schools in the East. It was upon a
military school on the upper Hud