The professor turned in the doorway, shrugging his shoulders into his topcoat. He smiled at the three section men gathered around the long table with the neat foot-high piles of blue books. His hand was on the knob as he said: "Be kind, gentlemen, but be, ha --ha, not too kind!"

The door closed behind him and the section men exchanged relieved glances.

"Well, where shall we begin?" said the section man who had won his key at Arkansas and could be seen every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the Hemenway calisthenics class.

Before the other two could intervene, the sallow section man with the tired moustache, who was a surreptitious poet, had pushed over all the piles and was mixing them together.

"I used to shuffle cards like this," he said, "in a wash basin. It's such fun. You let your fingers roam down through them till you feel a big flat book. Then you make a wish. Like this, for instance:

'I wish I may, I wish I might.

I wish this blue book is written by Zakewski.'

Then you pull it out, and sometimes it is."

The third section man coughed slightly. A big man in his class two or three years before, he had avoided his present colleagues for four years.

"My thought is that we should divide them by activities." He turned to the poet. "You can have the athletes. My sporting blood calls for a graduate student or two."

"I think we should explain things," interrupted the Southerner. "When a man gives too brief an answer, get out the text book and copy right out what it says on the point."

The Harvard man demurred. "A section man's answers should, I believe, have a certain pungency or alliteration or something that will pique the attention. Something like 'Too tenuous' or 'You do not catch the bite of the question'. That's the way one writes magazine articles."

"It's a bore," said the man from Arkansas, "but it has its compensations. I think the funniest of my experiences concerns a chap at mid-years last year. The question read: 'Using none of the information gleaned on your selected poet during the reading period, selection one whose life-time comes between the one not selected in question I (2) (b) (1), and the preceding poet, tell in detail his influence on the poet still undiscussed.'

"This man took the wrong poet. He was a Senior and had been retained on the hockey squad for the first time, I understand. I gave him a D plus, which put him nicely on pro."

They were on a subject dear to the heart of the old Master, as the student who "knew him when", called the recently graduated section man. He warmed instantly.

"Let me tell you the best story I ever heard, even if it is no me. This chap was one of those who think it the thing to go a-visiting the instructor, making throaty suggestions about the mark he has received. I remembered the fellow from midyears. I therefore told him, when he asked for my office house, that on such a point as this he must see the professor, who would, I knew, send him back to me. I knew, by the way, that the professor was already on his way for a sabbatical study of Chinese temples.

"The fellow caught the night plane for Chicago and was talking with the professor in Los Angeles when I sailed for Europe. He came back to a deserted Cambridge. I can just see him emptying the mailbox. Someone said he went into the automobile business."

The narrator himself joined in the laughter, as the poet turned to the man from Arkansas, and chuckled.

"Isn't he the card!"

* * *

Morning and the first meeting of the course in the second halfyear.

"Gentlemen, my invariable rule is to lower the grade of any man whom I interview about his examination." The professor beamed benevolently. "My assist ants in the course, I find, are less, shall we say, ha ha, harsh. So that if anyone cares to talk with them in the lower corridor of Sever between 5.30 and 6.45 next Saturday afternoon, he will find them not only cordial but disinterested."