They'll know whether you're sick or not, and they'll have you there, right on the spot to the minute!" The prediction was accurate.

The too fatherly "frat seniors" did all that Fred said they would, and more.

For the honour of the "frat," they coached the desperate Ramsey in the technic of Lumen debate, told him many more things to say than could be said in six minutes, and produced him, despairing, ghastly, and bedewed, in the large hall of the Lumen Society at eight o'clock on Friday evening.
Four other "twelve-minute debates" preceded his and the sound of these, in Ramsey's ears, was the sound of Gabriel practising on his horn in the early morning of Judgment Day.

The members of the society sat, three rows deep, along the walls of the room, leaving a clear oblong of green carpet in the centre, where were two small desks, twenty feet apart, the rostrums of the debaters.

Upon a platform at the head of the room sat dreadful seniors, the officers of the society, and, upon benches near the platform, the debaters of the evening were aligned.