THE BOOK OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN-ELEVEN 165
“Rent,” I reiterated feebly.
“Yes,” answered Miss Parris, encouragingly, while my breath came and went in windy
gusts. “But what kind of rent?”
Courage is the ability to dare, for a moment I became a hero.
Differential,’ I ventured, using a word as unfamiliar to me as cocoanuts and books
are to the North Pole, and then as I said it the enormity of my hardihood, and the probable
grossness of my error overcame me, and all of me flowed away into the toe of my shoe, and
settled there quivering.
“Differential rent, yes,” said Miss Parris from some distant height and no express
elevator in the flat-iron building rose with half the speed that I did to explain her next
selection.
“And this?” ,
“Is marginal rent,’ I beamed at her, turning the while one triumphant eye on the
Hyenas, who by this time were every one having fits.
The genuine history making event of Major Polecon was, however, the reports. We
began, in the first of the year, by taking the idea quite seriously, especially those of us who
found our subject widely discussed in every floor in the stack and in all its most inaccessible
corners. We have decided that the only possible good in the ill wind that brought the
scarlet fever germ to college was the fact that it afforded us a legimate excuse for postpon-
ing our reports; and postponed they were until the last week and a half of college. The
results of that hectic rush to the library, and the diminished size of the class, were many of
them gems. Do you remember how Schmidtie plead conversationally for a young man
with head and brains, as well as muscle and sinew, who with grit would unite the two
Americans in advantageous trade relations? And Higgie painted the English labour
wars with dramatic fervour, while Leila was briefly cognisant on the Panama question;
Esther, on the other hand gave us a well sustained (for an hour almost) account of French
family life and profit sharing, while I still blush to think how nobly I began with “Egypt
is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt,” only to end with the information that India is
irrigated by:— :
1 wells,
2 ditches,
and 3 canals.
The climax of the course was, properly enough, the final examination. Words fail
me now, as they failed us then, when I think of it. All I can say is that the 1911 in that
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