And if any three-thousand-dollar-a-year professor, through a too strict respect for Stillwater's standards of learning, should lose to that institution a half-million-dollar observatory, swimming-pool, or gymnasium, he was the sort of college president, who would see to it that the college lost also the services of that too conscientious instructor.
He did not put this in writing or in words, but just before the June examinations, when on, the campus he met one of the faculty, he would inquire with kindly interest as to the standing of young Hallowell.
"That is too bad!" he would exclaim, but, more in sorrow than in anger.
"Still, I hope the boy can pull through.

He is his dear father's pride, and his father's heart is set upon his son's obtaining his degree.

Let us hope he will pull through." For four years every professor had been pulling Peter through, and the conscience of each had become calloused.
They had only once more to shove him through and they would be free of him forever.

And so, although they did not conspire together, each knew that of the firing squad that was to aim its rifles at, Peter, HIS rifle would hold the blank cartridge.
The only one of them who did not know this was Doctor Henry Gilman.
Doctor Gilman was the professor of ancient and modern history at Stillwater, and greatly respected and loved.

He also was the author of those well-known text-books, "The Founders of Islam," and "The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire." This latter work, in five volumes, had been not unfavorably compared to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The original newspaper comment, dated some thirty years back, the doctor had preserved, and would produce it, now somewhat frayed and worn, and read it to visitors.