since and repeated year after year, in singsongy voices. One either took notes or didn't, as one chose. The classes were warned, however, that there would be stiff monthly tests to see how well the lectures had been absorbed by the listeners.
Harold found it somewhat bewildering. There was Dr. MacDonald, the trigonometry professor, who talked with such a Scottish burr that one could hardly distinguish one word from the other. He had a confusing habit of abbreviating everything, saying "coss" for "cosine" and "tang" for "tangent." As one of Harold's fellow classmen put it at the end of the first period, "Well, wouldn't that jar you? If that bird doesn't begin to talk English pretty soon, we're all sunk."
Then there was young Mr. Stoddard, the French instructor, a lanky ex-Rhodes scholar from Oxford. Stoddard didn't take his teaching seriously and was continually looking for ways of alleviating the tedium of his routine. He discovered one upon consulting the roll and finding Harold and a sad-faced farmer's son from South Dakota named Lyon in hisi class. Blithely disregarding the alphabetical order in which the classes were usually arranged, Stoddard put Harold in the first seat and Lyon in the last and then expected the roomful to be convulsed every morning when
