"You must tell Aunt Selina all about this. She'll be awfully glad to hear about it."
"Including Popham," said Harry in a low voice. James made no reply to this, for it scarcely called for a reply, but his lips were ever so slightly compressed as he walked through the front door.
During the idle months that followed Harry used his spare time for efforts in another and wholly different direction—a literary one. He became what is known in the parlance of the college as a "Lit. heeler"; that is, he contributed regularly to the Yale Literary Magazine. For the most part his contributions were accepted, and in the course of a few months his literary reputation in his class equaled his athletic fame. His verses, written chiefly in the Calverly vein, were equally sought for by both the Lit. and the Record, the humorous publication, and his prose, which generally took the form of short stories with a great deal of very pithy, rapid-fire dialogue in them, was looked upon favorably even by the reverend dons whose duty it was to review the undergraduates' monthly offerings to the muses.
"Has a cinder track been laid to the top of Parnassus?" wrote one who rather prided himself on his quaint and whimsical fancy. "Do poets hurdle and sprint where once they painfully climbed? Do the joyous Nine now stand at the top holding a measuring tape and wet sponges, instead of laurel wreaths, as of old? Assuredly we shall have to answer in the affirmative after reading the story 'Quest and Question' which appeared in the last issue of the Lit., for not only is the writer of this, the best and brightest offering of the month, a mere freshman, but a freshman who, it seems, has distinguished himself so far for physical rather than mental agility. The 'question' about Mr. Wimbourne appears, indeed, to be whether the fleetness of his metrical feet can equal that of his material ones," etc.
All this amused Harry, who, it is to be feared, sometimes laughed at rather than with his reviewers; and it gave him something to think about outside of his studies and his classmates, both of which palled upon him heavily at times. But he was irritated from time to time by the way in which even literary recreation was looked upon, by the undergraduate body. A casual and kindly remark of a classmate, "Hullo, I see you're ahead in the Lit. competition," would often throw him into a state of restless depression from which only the soothing presence of Trotwood could reclaim him.
"Isn't it awful, Trotty," he once complained; "Euterpe (she's the lyric muse, you know), has deserted me. I haven't been able to write a line for a month. Of course the loss to the world of letters is almost irreparable, but that's not the worst of it. You see, if I can't write, I shan't do well in the Lit. competition, and if I don't do well I shan't make the chairmanship, and if I don't make the chairmanship in the competition, I shan't make a senior society, and wouldn't that be terrible, Trotty?"
"Cheer up, old cow; you probably won't make one anyway," suggested Trotty reassuringly, and Harry laughed.
The football game with Harvard was played in New Haven that year, and Harry took Aunt Selina to it. Aunt Selina had never seen James play, and was anxious to go on that account, though she had not been to a game for many years, and even the last one she had seen was baseball.
"You must explain the fine points of the game to me, my dear," she told him as they drove grandly out to the field in her victoria. "You see, I have not been to a game since the seventies, and I daresay the rules have changed somewhat since then. I used to take a great interest in it, but I've forgotten all about it, now."