You remember Petey, of course. He went through Siwash in four years and eight suspensions, and came out fresh--as fresh as when he went in, which is saying a good deal. Every summer during his career the Faculty went to a rest cure and tried to forget him. He was as handy to have around school as a fox terrier in a cat show. There are two varieties of college students--the midnight-oil and the natural-gas kind; and Petey was a whole gas well in himself. Not that he didn't study. He was the hardest student in the college, but he didn't recite much in classes. Sometimes he recited in the police court, sometimes to his Pa back home, and sometimes the whole college took a hand in looking over his examination papers. He used to pass medium fair in Horace; sub-passable in Trig., and extraordinary mediocre in Polikon. But his marks in Imagination, the Psychological Moment and Dodging Consequences were plus perfect, extra magnificent, and superlatively some, respectively.
I saw Petey last year. He is in Chicago now. You have to bribe a doorkeeper and bluff a secretary to get to him--that is, you do if you are an ordinary mortal. But if you give the Siwash yell or the Eta Bita Pie whistle in the outside office he will emerge from his office out over the railing in one joyous jump. He came to Chicago ten years ago equipped with a diploma and a two-year tailor-bill back at Jonesville that he had been afraid to tell his folks about. If he had been a midnight-oil graduate he would have worn out three pairs of shoes hunting for a business house which was willing to let an earnest young scholar enter its employ at the bottom and rise gradually to the top as the century went by. But Petey wasn't that kind. He had been used to running the whole college and messing up the universe as far as one could see from the Siwash belfry if things didn't suit him. So he picked out the likeliest-looking institution on Dearborn Street and offered it a position as his employer. He was on the payroll before the president got over his daze. Two weeks later he promoted the firm to a more responsible job--that of paying him a bigger salary--and a year ago the general manager gave up and went to Europe for two years; said he would take a positive pleasure in coming back and looking at the map of Chicago after Petey had done it over to suit himself.