“Well,” Johnson said, when the two days’ trial was over and they were settled comfortably in Scott’s room, “they bowled me over on some of that German stuff, but I think that I hit the most of it pretty hard. That grubbing around I did last summer helped me a lot and I fairly killed that lumbering.”
“I’m not going to speculate,” Scott said, “but it seemed easy to me. That’s when a fellow flunks the worst, when it seems easy.”
“It was good practice, anyway,” Johnson said; “I would not take a job yet if I could get it. I know better what I ought to study next year, and that is what I took it for.”
So the great event for which they had been working so hard for two months was laid away on the shelf and Scott settled down to his lighter schedule. The rest of his class went away to the Forest Experiment Station at Cloquet, but Scott’s irregular course forced him to stay at the College. He put in his spare time reading along those lines and when his class work was over, June 1, went up there for a week.
The other men came down about that time so he had a week alone with the director of the station. The experience opened up a new line of thought to him. He had studied the growth and learned the characteristics of trees; here he found exact scientific experiments to discover the facts which controlled that growth and formed those characteristics. It was a fascinating field, especially the study of all the instruments which were used to wrest from nature the answers to the pertinent questions which the practical work suggested.
Scott would have liked to stay longer at the Station, but it was time for commencement, and after that he was going home. That overshadowed everything now. The solemn rites of commencement, and even the almost sacred last meeting of the old Itasca corporation, were dimmed by the visions of the home which he had not seen for two long years.
The last ringing cheers of the old corporation had scarcely died away when he was on a train traveling all too slowly eastward. The states crept by very slowly, but on the second day he found himself in the Berkshire hills and felt that he was almost home.
No sooner had the train stopped than he was out and up the village street. He had not told them what train he would take and no one was at the station to meet him. He felt that he would rather not meet them at the station anyway. Everything about the village looked so quiet, and peaceful, and old.
He would not have changed a stick of it for all the slurs the Westerners could cast upon its sleepiness.
About halfway home he met Dick Bradshaw. The two boys greeted each other eagerly.