without saying that he was good-looking; and of course he must have been
jolly and pleasant or he wouldn’t have been so popular. As a matter of
fact, Jack was very good-looking, unusually jolly, and uncommonly popular.
He was one of the best liked men in each of the colleges which he had
attended. There was something so winning about his smile and his eternal
good humor that no one ever tried to dislike him; and if anyone ever had
tried he or she would not have succeeded for very long. It is probably
very unfortunate that the world is so full of this type of young man, but
that which should cause us all to have infinite patience with them is the
reflection of how much more unfortunate it would be if they were suddenly
eliminated from the general scheme of things.

Like all college boys, Jack had a chum. The chum was Robert Burnett,
another charming young fellow of one-and-twenty, whose education had been
so cosmopolitan in design and so patriotic in practice that he always said
"Sacre bleu" and "Donnerwetter" when he thought of it, and "Great Scott"
when he didn’t. He and Jack were as congenial a pair as ever existed, and
they had just about as much in common as the aunt of the one and the
father of the other had had to pay for.

In the February of the year of which I write, Washington, celebrating his
birthday as usual, gave all American students their usual chance to
celebrate with him. Celebrations were temptations incarnate to Jack, and
he was feeling frowningly what a clog Aunt Mary’s latest epistle was upon
his joys, when his friend came to the rescue with an invitation to spend
the double holiday (it doubled that year—Sunday, you know) at the
brand-new ancestral castle which Burnett _père_ had just finished building
for his descendants. It may be imagined that Jack accepted the invitation
with alacrity, and that his never-very-downcast heart bounded gleefully
higher than usual over the prospect of two days of pleasure in the