Westcott’s was in some ways a bit old-fashioned. Holidays were grudgingly given, visitors were not suffered to intrude on recitations, and every school day was made a working day, with enforced privileges on Saturdays if the week’s work was not satisfactorily done. Scholastic flummery, the advertising quackery of shows and visitors’ days and special programmes, found no favor with the authorities. If any exception is to be made to this general rule, it must apply to the day on which school closed for the Christmas holidays, when for half an hour at the close of recitations the boys themselves took charge of the schoolroom, and celebrated in their own way their approaching liberty and their loyalty to the school.

Even here the programme was very simple. When the twelve o’clock gong sounded, the whole school assembled in the big room. Old Westcottites from college poured in, thronging the wide doorway of the library, and circling the end of the schoolroom in a long line. A representative of the first class came forward, and in a little speech, delivered usually with a flushed face and in a faint, agitated voice, presented to the school a gift which should be a permanent reminder of the affection and esteem of the outgoing class. Mr. Westcott then made a response, which was followed sometimes by a few words from some teacher. After this various boys chosen from the managing class stepped forward and led cheers for the school, for the individual teachers, and for the athletic teams. Then old boys, if any were bold enough, or unable to resist the pressure put upon them, took their turn, and exhorted the school or praised it, as inspiration (or their confusion) led them. No boy who was present on the day when three captains of Harvard teams and two class-day marshals—all old Westcottites—followed each other to the platform, will soon forget the impression made by those stalwart figures, intelligent faces, and sincere if inartistic speeches. Not the bishop nor the learned professor nor the governor himself could so stir the hearts of the school. These college men were authorities, men who had achieved, heroes within the range of every boy’s admiration.

This year, only one of these representatives from the upper world was booked to address the school, but as he was no less a personage than captain of the Varsity crew, he counted in general estimation tenfold. Roger Hardie, being in the second class, played spectator and common soldier in the cheering battalion. Mr. Westcott’s speech and Mr. Cary’s left him rather cold; he had heard these gentlemen many times before in various forms of discourse from cautious praise to unreserved condemnation. But when Deering was demanded, and in response a tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, bronzed young man emerged from the library and pushed forward through a tumult of welcome, Roger’s heart leaped to greet him.

For half a minute Deering stood with his hand on the desk, waiting for the din to subside. Roger fixed his eyes upon him, and in an intense stare drank in an impression of the man. He was quietly dressed, his necktie subdued, his trousers—Dunn might perhaps have noticed—not absolutely fresh from the tailor’s goose. But Deering was one for whom clothes could do little. Such bigness, honesty, cleanness, determination, and withal such fresh unconquerable strength of youth, no smart costume could adorn. In some manner he suggested Talbot—Talbot as he might be four years hence, when his body had reached its growth and the maturing influences of college life had tamed his explosive violence.

Deering’s speech was addressed to the first class. When the boys before him reached college, he said, they would find certain men doing all sorts of things that they’d better not be doing, wasting their money and time and strength, and thinking that they were cutting a great figure. There were plenty of such fellows hanging round the college, who were of no use to the college or to themselves. They make a great mistake. No one cares anything about them, and they don’t make good. The fellow who has principles and tries to live up to them, who is willing to work hard and keep faced in the right direction, is the man who is respected, whether he makes a name for himself or not.

“You’ve got to mean right and work right,” he said in closing. “You can’t mean right unless you have principles to follow, and the only way to work right is to work hard. Here in school is the place to make a good start. I don’t need to say anything about your studies, for your teachers will see to that, but in your athletics, unless there’s been a big change since my day, there’s room for improvement. You want to play fair and play like gentlemen, but play hard. Give the best of yourselves to your practice as well as to your matches. Don’t fool, and don’t shirk, and don’t quit. And when you come to college, don’t let any one persuade you that the ideals and moral standards you’ve learned here will have to be changed.”

Had the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric from across the Charles been present in the Westcott schoolroom that morning, he would have listened patronizingly and given the speaker a passing grade in consideration of his earnestness and good intentions. Had the professor spoken in Deering’s place, the boys would have closed their ears to his careful sentences and mentally marked him F—flat failure. They voted Deering A, and after their reserved fashion, assented to his maxims and treasured up his words. Even Dunn had visions of a time coming—in the dim future, of course—when he should throw off his indolence and self-indulgence, be a “good boy” and a grind, work like a Trojan in school and out, and win back the ground that he had lost. When it came to baseball, he could show them a few things!

As for Roger Hardie, Deering’s exhortation, and even more Deering’s personality, was as a match applied to tinder. His zeal took fire immediately. If the rowing men were like Deering, if rowing made such men, rowing was the thing for him! If honest, serious work profited at all in this untried sport in which experience was held to be so important, Roger would give that work ungrudgingly as long as his presence was tolerated on the squad. This resolve sent him to the gymnasium to exercise every day during the Christmas recess, when, save for himself and Mike and two smaller urchins, Adams’s was bereft of boys. It forced him to look upon himself as, in a fashion, consecrated to a special ambition, none the less wholesome and potent because cherished in secret. It made it easier for him to keep faith with his parents and his own conscience in the presence of the insidious temptations to which he, in common with all boys of his age, was subjected.

The tide of boys flooded back to school on the second of January, noisy with reminiscences of good times enjoyed. Talbot came from a camp on the shore of Cape Cod, where he had been shooting with Trask; Ben Tracy from Montreal. Dunn had spent his freedom in New York, where he had “been to something every night and had the highest old kind of a time.” The anecdotes of his experiences furnished him amusement for a week; his listeners tired of them in a much shorter time. Aside from these anecdotes, Dunn brought back little that was new from his vacation, certainly nothing so beneficial to himself or the school as an earnest purpose. He continued to slide downhill with careless content, finding specious excuses to present to teachers for classroom failures, and flattering himself that he was playing a grand rÔle in the eyes of his mates as a jaunty, devil-may-care loafer.

The winter term in all schools is sacred to work. The boys at Westcott’s, under pressure at home and in school, on the whole did their full stint with faithfulness and good-will. But there was no lack of distraction abroad or fun at school. Outside were the official amusements at Adams’s, skating at the Country Club, occasional dancing parties, lectures for the intellectual, theatre for the frivolous, and jolly visiting among friends for all. At school, some petty excitement was always to be found. A lively recitation has its interest for a keen-witted boy, especially if it exhibits a Dunn trying to palm off an old excuse or a Redfield to originate a new blunder. Some one was usually in trouble, and the trouble of a school-mate, if not too serious, is always interesting to the bystanders. And there were occasions when the amusement was not wholly innocent.

The great fault with the Westcott lads was their thoughtlessness. They had never known the sting of poverty, nor suffered from the want of anything which it was at all desirable that they should have. Some of them had feeble sense of the sacredness of property; a thing that could be bought by a small requisition on their pocket-money possessed in their eyes slight value. When Wilmot unscrewed an electric-light bulb in the lower hall and flung it the whole length of the play room to smash into a hundred pieces against the brick wall, he was simply yielding to a reckless impulse of fun. He would have taken his punishment without complaint if he had been caught, and he would have confessed the deed honestly if he had been questioned; but he had no idea that he was stealing. When Cable dropped a new stiff hat at the cloak-room door, and half a dozen rascals immediately kicked it into tatters, they thought they were having fun with Cable—until after an interview with Mr. Westcott. If a book was left about the halls,—the owner had no business to drop his books around,—some one was quite likely to use it as a missile on his way out. Talbot and Hardie and Harrison and others of the older boys regarded such an act as “kiddish”; Wilmot would commit it because of uncontrolled recklessness, Dunn because he was a fool.

It was the laboratory at the top of the building that offered to heedless spirits the greatest temptation. Here both the chemistry and the physics classes performed their experiments and made their recitations. Mr. Cary, the instructor, was neither incompetent nor a weakling; but he couldn’t be in the laboratory all the time nor in all parts of it at the same time. Interesting experiments were tried that had no place in the text-book. For two weeks a jar hidden in the corner served as a receptacle for odds and ends of chemicals, and was visited surreptitiously every day by various members of the class, curious to see what new color it had taken on. Reeves discovered that a cent could be silvered by dipping it in nitric acid, then in mercury, and then, for an instant, in the acid again. Thereupon a mania for silvering objects suddenly developed which had to be repressed by official order. With a piece of glass tubing drawn to a point and attached by a rubber hose to a faucet, Trask found that he could throw a fine jet of water to a considerable distance. He used to train this with great effect on persons standing yards away, the spray being invisible but very distinctly felt. It struck Hardie one day in the back of the neck just above his collar, as he was standing beside Mr. Cary’s desk. He couldn’t turn round or dodge the stream, for Mr. Cary was looking over his note-book, and any movement would have betrayed the offenders. So he stood helpless, furtively swabbing with his handkerchief at the back of his head, but failing with all his efforts to dam the stream that trickled down his back.

Impunity encourages. One day at recess, some scapegrace made an obnoxious mixture in an open dish by means of iron sulphide and hydrochloric acid, and fled for his life, leaving the laboratory door open. The fumes descended the stairways and reached the noses of innocent sufferers below. Mr. Westcott and Mr. Cary arrived at the laboratory simultaneously, hot on the scent, and took counsel together. Later in the day Mr. Westcott called the laboratory classes into his room and demanded the culprit. No one volunteering, he explained the danger and wrong of fooling in the laboratory, and declared that he should punish severely any further misdemeanor, even if it were necessary to inflict the penalty on the whole class.

As Mr. Westcott was not given to idle threats, there was seriousness on the top floor—for a time.