“I saw your headmaster the other day,” he answered. “You don’t suppose you’d have had any chance to go if I found that you had been neglecting your school work during the winter, do you?”
“But the exams?”
“Are all arranged. The headmaster said your term marks were high enough to let an average examination pass you easily. The questions are to be given me in a sealed envelope, I shall hand them to your uncle, and at some convenient time, probably on board ship, you’re to do the exams and your uncle will forward them to the school with a letter saying that they were done in his presence and without any assistance from him. A certain percentage is to be taken off for irregularity, but unless you fall down hopelessly on the papers, I feel sure that you will pass for the year.”
“You’ve thought of everything, Father,” rejoined the boy, gratefully.
“Well, son,” was the response, “it’s up to you to make the most of it. The arrangements are a little sudden, but you can be ready in a couple of weeks, can’t you?”
“I could be ready in half an hour,” Perry exclaimed enthusiastically.
“That’s rather precipitate,” his father commented, as they turned into the street leading to the office, near the corner where the two generally parted, “we won’t ask anything as rapid as that. But two weeks from to-day, you’re to start for New York, and there you’ll board the steamer for the Mediterranean. It’s a great chance for you, my boy.”
During those two weeks Perry walked on air. He was the envy of all his boy chums and by the time he was ready to start he had been asked for so many fossil remains by his boy friends (who didn’t know whether a Mosasaurus was the size of a sparrow or a whale) that he would have had to discover a prehistoric cemetery in order to fulfill all the requests. But the boy had been thoroughly trained not to make promises he could not keep, and thus he saved himself from many an awkward refusal later.
When the fated day came round, when he had seen his pith helmet and other parts of his tropical outfit safely packed, Perry was so excited that he could hardly talk, and his farewells were little more than stammering interjections. His mother was disappointed, for she expected some evidence of emotion, but the old merchant knew boy nature better and was well pleased over the lad’s eagerness to be off. Indeed, despite his years, the financier envied his son and would have liked nothing better than to have been able to jump aboard the train with him. But he contented himself with a hearty handshake—quite a grown-up one, purposely—and stepped into his motor-car resignedly, as the departing train rounded a distant curve.
As the through express thundered past station after station, Perry had one swift pang of regret to think of the school commencement and the games he would miss, but when he thought of what was ahead of him, the thrill of doing real things came over him like a tornado and swept aside all thoughts of school. That his learning was not over, but only just beginning, he thoroughly realized, for along this line had been his father’s parting words: