Meanwhile Dopey McNab was just as zealously concerned in the pursuit of his classic ideal, which, however, was imagined more along the lines of such historic scholars as Verdant Green, Harry Foker, and certain heroes of his favorite author, Charles Lever.
The annoyance of recitations by an economical imagination he converted into periods of repose and refreshing slumber behind the broad back of McMasters, who, for a certain fixed portion of tobacco a week, agreed to act as a wall in moments of calm and to awake him with a kick on the shins when the summons to refuse to recite arrived.
Having discovered Buck Waters as a companionable soul, congenially inclined to the pagan view of life, it was not long before the two discovered the third completing genius in the person of Tom Kelly, who, though a member of the Sheff freshman class, immediately agreed not to let either time, place, or conflicting recitations stand in the way of that superior mental education which must result from the friction of three such active imaginations.
The triumvirate was established on a firm foundation on the day after Kelly's ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to hit the moon with a pool-ball, and immediately began a series of practical jokes and larks which threatened to terminate abruptly the partnership or remove it bodily to an unimaginative outer world.
McNab, like most gentlemen of determined leisure, worked indefatigably every minute of the day. Having slept through chapel and first recitation, with an occasional interruption to rise and say with great dignity "Not prepared," he would suddenly, about ten o'clock in the morning, awake with a start, and drifting into Stover's room plaster his nose to the window and restlessly ask himself what mischief he could invent for the day.
After a moment of dissatisfied introspection, he would say fretfully:
"I say, Dink?"
"Hello!"
"Studying?"
"Yes."