Boys of the Central: A High-School Story

by I. T. Thurston

His eye fell on his geometry. He stretched his hand towards it, then drew it back, a hot flush burning on his cheek.

“On honor!” he murmured, and pushing the book aside, he tried again to think out the solution required, but in vain. For half an hour he sat there fighting against the temptation that assailed him. Once he folded his unfinished paper, and started to put it in the drawer; then, remembering how Gordon, Clark and Hamlin had gone off an hour before—with every question correctly answered, he was sure—he dropped back into his seat with a groan.

“I can’t let them get ahead of me, so,” he thought. “I’m really a better scholar than anyone of the lot. It’s just that my head is so dead tired! I really do know every page of that geometry, if I only could think of it—if only I could.”

But he could not, try as he would. Then the janitor looked in at the door, and St. John knew that he wanted to clean the room. He began wearily to put away his papers. Suddenly he reached forward, snatched his geometry, and hurriedly turning the leaves, looked at the theorem that he had been trying to recall. Then, flinging the book aside, he hastily wrote out the explanation on his examination paper, folded it, and flung it carelessly into the drawer, and, forgetting entirely that he was to lock the drawer and keep the key until morning, he picked up his cap and left the room. His paper was all right, he was sure, but already he felt that he had paid too high a price for it.

The examinations that followed were conducted on the same principle as this first one, and Mr. Horton was so well satisfied with the result that he determined that he would never go back to the old watching method again. The Latin examination was held the next week, and, so far as was known, not one boy attempted underhanded methods.

St. John was so thoroughly at home in Latin, that he was among the first to complete his work, and he left the room with a sigh of relief that one more task was over, for he had reached that stage of mental and physical exhaustion when the smallest task seems a load too heavy to be borne, and he was gathering all his energies to finish the Latin essay that was to decide who should hold first rank in the class.

For weeks he had been working at that essay, writing and rewriting; one day pleased with his work, the next so dissatisfied that he would throw it aside and begin anew. But now, the time was short, and in a few days the essay must be handed in to the judges.

Gordon, Hamlin and Clark were also more than a little concerned about their essays.

“It isn’t the putting it into Latin; it’s getting the ideas in English that sticks me,” Hamlin said to Clark one day. “I’ve been cudgeling my brains, and it does seem as if I haven’t an idea worth writing down, on any subject whatever.”

“Queer, how a fellow’s ideas do vanish the minute he tries to write ’em out on paper,” said Clark. “I couldn’t get to sleep the other night for thinking about that essay, and while I lay awake, I thought of a subject, and one idea after another came to me, till I jumped out of bed and went to scribbling. Then I went back to bed and to sleep, and in the morning, when I read over my bright ideas, they seemed just about as near nothing as anything I ever read. So I flung the whole thing into the waste-basket, and began over again.”