"Oh, but it was fun, wasn't it, boys?" cried Lincoln.
"You bet it was. Let's go again next year."
"All right," said Milton; "raise your weapons and swear."
They all lifted their knives in solemn covenant to go again the following year. But they never did. Of such changeful stuff are the plans of youth!
A Thread without a Knot
I
When the assistant in the history department announced to Professor Endicott his intention of spending several months in Paris to complete the research work necessary to his doctor's dissertation,[114-1] ] the head of the department looked at him with an astonishment so unflattering in its significance that the younger man laughed aloud.
"You didn't think I had it in me to take it so seriously, did you, Prof?" he said, with his usual undisturbed and amused perception of the other's estimate of him. "And you're dead right, too! I'm doing it because I've got to, that's all. It's borne in on me that you can't climb up very fast in modern American universities unless you've got a doctor's degree, and you can't be a Ph.D. without having dug around some in a European library. I've picked out a subject that needs just as little of that as any—you know as well as I do that right here in Illinois I can find out everything that's worth knowing about the early French explorers of the Mississippi—but three months in the Archives[114-2] ] in Paris ought to put a polish on my dissertation that will make even Columbia and Harvard sit up and blink. Am I right in my calculations?"