Here is an account, not reprinted from the current issue of the American Magazine, of the rise of a Man. To those whose present position seems to hold little future for them, to those who feel that their feet are caught in the Slough of Education, to those who feel within them the desire of the moth for the star, the story of Robert Lampoon will have a meaning all its own. Read then, all you in whom the flame of ambition is not yet suffocated, read the story of Lampoon, the Boy who became a Man overnight.

Mr. Lampoon rose easily from the camp stool in his office, and greeted me with a firm grip and a twinkle in that eye of his.

"What can I tell you that is not 'an old story', as I call it? There is little that I can add to my series of articles on 'The College Undergraduate as I Know Him' which you must have followed in 'I Confess.'"

He turned his great, handsome face, with the magnificent chin that has just begun to gray a little, toward the window, but not before I had seen a flickering shadow of disillusionment cross it. Or could one call that shadow disillusionment?

Then he arose and stood gazing up at the sidewalk level, where hundreds of feet could be seen as they passed the window. He pointed to one seedy pair of Legs, sauntering by on broken shoes. "There, but for the grace of God, stand I," he murmured. Suddenly he swung around and began to talk, crossing and recrossing the office at a single stride.

"In every life, you know there comes some one big crisis. Here is the story of mine. In 1909 I took over the janitorship, for such it was then called of this block of stores. Of course, the problem of residue is one of the regular ones of the janitorial career, but rarely does it approach the dimensions of a crisis, still more rarely of a Crisis. I had successfully disposed of the waste products of the carious tailoring establishments, smoke shops, and lunchrooms which occupy the building. Then suddenly it came.

"I was walking through the cellar one day, when I noticed that one of my coal bins had been completely filled with thousands of copies of some pamphlet. This was a clear hint, which I immediately seized. I cancelled all my coal orders for that month and used the pamphlets. They were all new, bore no signs that anyone had ever opened them. In this way I saved the price of 44 tons of coal, which will keep me in penwipers for the rest of my life. You may be interested to know that I was the one who originated the term 'white coal', which has since been erroneously applied to water power.

"One day in January I went down to the cellar as usual. I started back in horror against the bulkhead, for the cursed white flood was rising higher. The tide of pamphlets had seemed to run in fortnightly or monthly waves. By keeping the block of stores at 95 degrees throughout the fall, I had been able to hold the paper flood in check, but what was I to do when the paper spring tides were upon me?

"I roamed the streets all night, fear wrapping cold fingers about my brow and the cold sweat on my heart. But with morning came relief. At that time I remembered suddenly, they were filling in the last of the made land in the Back Bay. I got a special interview with the Mayor, and he ordered a fleet of dump carts to leave for Cambridge, with me as pilot.

"We arrived in the nick of time, for the white flood had seeped up through the bulkhead and cellar windows, and Mount Auburn Street was snowy with the stuff. For days afterward the sewers were clogged, but this quality of the printed matter had its good side as well. The city officials said that none of the dirt from Fort Hill had packed so solidly and heavily as each successive load of Lampoon's."

He cocked his feet on his desk, indicating that the audience was at a close. My last view of the Master, as he has been called by the janitor of Randolph Hall, was of him gazing up at the feet passing by his window seeing . . . who knows what.