s they came up to College were drawn around him--partly because
their homage pleased him, and partly because he loved anything whatever
that came out of Barbie. There was no harm in Allan--though when his
face was in repose you saw the look in his eye at times of a man
defrauding his soul. A robustious young fellow of sense and brains would
have found in this lover of books and a bottle not a bad comrade. But he
was the worst of cronies for a weak swaggerer like Gourlay. For Gourlay,
admiring the older man's jovial power, was led on to imitate his faults,
to think them virtues and a credit; and he lacked the clear, cool head
that kept Allan's faults from flying away with him.

At dinner that night there were several braw, braw lads of Barbie Water.
There were Tarmillan the doctor (a son of Irrendavie), Logan the
cashier, Tozer the Englishman, old Partan--a guileless and inquiring
mind--and half a dozen students raw from the west. The students were of
the kind that goes up to College with the hayseed sticking in its hair.
Two are in a Colonial Cabinet now, two are in the poorhouse. So they go.

Tarmillan was the last to arrive. He came in sucking his thumb, into
which he had driven a splinter while conducting an experiment.

"I've a morbid horror of lockjaw," he explained. "I never get a jag from
a pin but I see myself in the shape of a hoop, semicircular, with my
head on one end of a table, my heels on the other, and a doctor standing
on my navel trying to reduce the curvature."

"Gosh!" said Partan, who was a literal fool, "is that the treatment they
purshoo?"

"That's the treatment!" said Tarmillan, sizing up his man. "Oh, it's a
queer thing lockjaw! I remember when I was gold-mining in Tibet, one of
our carriers who died of lockjaw had such a circumbendibus in his body
that we froze him and made him the hoop of a bucket to carry our water
in. You see he was a thin bit man, and iron was scarce."

"Ay, man!" cried Partan, "you've been in Tibet?"

"Often," waved Tarmillan, "often! I used to go there every summer."

Partan, who liked to extend his geographical knowledge, would have
talked of Tibet for the rest of the evening--and Tarmie would have told
him news--but Allan broke in.

"How's the book, Tarmillan?" he inquired.

Tarmillan was engaged on a treatise which those who are competent to
judge consider the best thing of its kind ever written.

"Oh, don't ask me," he writhed. "Man, it's an irksome thing to