HIS name, written with neat exactness on the paper cover of each of his schoolbooks, had a certain sound of solid dignity—Oliver Morse. Yet there was nothing impressive about his appearance in his junior year at Northfield. He was tall and sallow, with thin, straight, straw-colored hair, and half-squinted, watery, inquiring eyes behind very thick eyeglasses. His shoulders had the stoop that comes from too much study and not enough vigorous exercise. Trudging to school, with his books in a worn brief case that swung at his side and that now and then got caught in between his dangling legs, he looked for all the world like the pictures mischievous boys used to draw of absent-minded professors. Some one once said that, when he stood up to recite, he looked like a scarecrow that had deserted its cornfield and had started out to secure an education. He talked through his nose with his
