True, if the members of the faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than whispered, in the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been conferred on him.

But it so happened that at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a university to its base.

The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment.

For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution.

The proposal was nothing less than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations of the university.