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. He knew it by heart, but to him it always possessed
a contemporary and news interest.

"Here is a review of the history," he would say--he always
referred to it as "the" history--"that I came across in my
TRANSCRIPT."

In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a
period that it was as though the clipping had been printed
the previous after-noon.

The members of his class who were examined on the "Rise and
Fall," and who invariably came to grief over it, referred to
it briefly as the Fall," sometimes feelingly as "the. . . .
Fall." The" history began when Constantinople was Byzantium,
skipped lightly over six centuries to Constantine, and in the
last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds with the downfall