embarrassing way.

"Gosh, Johnny McLean," Tim Erwin remarked finally, "wake up and
hear the birdies sing. Do you mean to tell me you don't know
you're the hero of the whole blamed nation?"

And Johnny McLean turned scarlet and replied that he didn't think
it so particularly funny to guy a man who had attended strictly
to his business, and walked off. While Erwin and the others
regarded him astounded.

"Well, if that isn't too much!" gasped Tim. "He actually doesn't know!"

"He's likely to find out before we get through," Neddy Haines,
of Denver, jerked out nasally and they laughed as if at a secret
known together.

So Johnny pursued his way through the two or three days before
commencement, absorbed in meeting friends, embarrassed at times
by their manner, but taking obstinately the modest place in the
class which he had filled in college. It did not enter his mind
that anything he had done could alter his standing with the
"fellows." Moreover, he did not spend time considering that.
So he was one of two hundred Buster Browns who marched to Yale Field
in white Russian blouses with shiny blue belts, in sailor hats
with blue ribbons, and when the Triennials rushed tempestuously
down Trumbull Street in the tracks of the gray-beards of thirty-five
years before, Johnny found himself carried forward so that he
stood close to the iron fence which guards the little yard from
the street. There is always an afternoon tea at the president's