"First they sat next to each other in some course," explained Holworthy. "One day Jack was out in his dog-cart, I believe, and met Varnum walking and picked him up. Jack was a Sophomore then, but a pretty good sort of a Soph., and I think he was rather surprised and interested at discovering that there were men in this University outside of his own little set, and of a new kind."
"That fellow Varnum is a rattler," said Rivers. "Hardly anyone knows him except the crew men, and, I suppose, some of his Y. M. C. A. pals. He has been making an awfully sandy fight of it, I can tell you, working his way all through college. Why, do you know, that chap came up with just two dollars and forty cents in his pocket!"
"There are lots of men doing just that sort of thing," declared Ernest Gray, a sympathetic, enthusiastic little man. "Some day we'll be proud of having been in the same class with some of those fellows. It's a shame that we don't know all about all of 'em."
"Oh, well," said Burleigh, consolingly, "we can always let people think we were hand in glove with the great men. 'Know him? Why he was a classmate of mine'—all that sort of thing, you know."
"Yes," said Dick Stoughton, "it's a comfort to reflect that we can always blow about them without taking the trouble to hunt them up now."
"Awful nuisance to chase up incipient and impecunious merit," added Hudson.
"I suppose that's why you helped Jack Rattleton take care of Varnum when he was sick. Why do you affected fools always want to cover up the precious little good you have got in you?" demanded Gray, in a mixture of sorrow and anger.
"One reason why they do it," said Holworthy, "is to make you flare up, you little powder keg. Haven't you got used to it yet, after three years?"
"Varnum is a first-rate coxswain, anyway," said Captain Bender, coming down to his regular estimate of worth. "I ran across him last year when I was looking for a light man to steer. It's lucky I did, too; for there was a great dearth of rudder-men. This little firebrand Gray would have wrecked the 'Varsity crew to a certainty. I watched him in the class races last year—he came near grabbing stroke's oar and trying to pull himself. He nearly killed his men yelling at them in the first mile."
"I should think he did," ejaculated Randolph, who had rowed in his class crew.