Free Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock Page B

what miners call a pocket, – of pure gold in a Devonian formation of the post-tertiary period. This once established, we must revise our entire theory of the distribution of igneous and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes together for a paper for the Pan-Geological under the heading, ‘Auriferous Excretions in the Devonian Strata: a Working Hypothesis.’ I hope to read it at the next meeting.”
    The young demonstrator looked at the professor with one eye half closed.
    “I don’t think I would if I were you,” he said.
    Now this young demonstrator knew nothing, or practically nothing, of geology, because he came of one of the richest and best families in town and didn’t need to. But hewas a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion, with brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes than Professor Gildas in his whole existence.
    “Why not?” said the professor.
    “Why, don’t you see what’s happened?”
    “Eh?” said Gildas.
    “What happened to those first samples? When that bunch got interested and planned to float the company? Don’t you see? Somebody salted them on you.”
    “
Salted
them on me?” repeated the professor, mystified.
    “Yes, salted them. Somebody got wise to what they were and swopped them on you for the real thing, so as to get your certified report that the stuff was gold.”
    “I begin to see,” muttered the professor. “Somebody exchanged the samples, some person no doubt desirous of establishing the theory that a sporadic outcropping of the sort might be found in a post-tertiary formation. I see, I see. No doubt he intended to prepare a paper on it, and prove his thesis by these tests. I see it all!”
    The demonstrator looked at the professor with a sort of pity.
    “You’re on!” he said, and he laughed softly to himself. “Well,” said Dr. Boomer, after Tomlinson had left the university, “what do you make of him?” The president had taken Dr. Boyster over to his house beside the campus, and there in his study had given him a cigar as big as a rope and taken another himself. This was a sign that Dr. Boomer wanted Dr. Boyster’s opinion in plain English, without any Latin about it.
    “Remarkable man,” said the professor of Greek; “wonderful penetration, and a man of very few words. Of course his game is clear enough?”
    “Entirely so,” asserted Dr. Boomer.
    “It’s clear enough that he means to give the money on two conditions.”
    “Exactly,” said the president.
    “First that we admit his son, who is quite unqualified, to the senior studies in electrical science, and second that we grant him the degree of Doctor of Letters. Those are his terms.”
    “Can we meet them?”
    “Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty, of course; as to the degree, it’s only a question of getting the faculty to vote it. I think we can manage it.”
    Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members of the faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than whispered, in the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a university to its base. The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution. The proposal was nothing less than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations of the university. Anyone conversant with the inner life of a college will realise that to many of the professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society. They must fight it back