"And at fifty it means twenty-five million," Dick laughed.

But his guardians never believed in the wild oats pilgrimage he
threatened. He might waste his fortune on new-fangled farming, but to
go literally wild after such years of self-restraint was an
unthinkable thing.

Dick took his sheepskin with small honor. He was twenty-eighth in his
class, and he had not set the college world afire. His most notable
achievement had been his resistance and bafflement of many nice girls
and of the mothers of many nice girls. Next, after that, he had
signalized his Senior year by captaining the Varsity to its first
victory over Stanford in five years. It was in the day prior to large-
salaried football coaches, when individual play meant much; but he
hammered team-work and the sacrifice of the individual into his team,
so that on Thanksgiving Day, over a vastly more brilliant eleven, the
Blue and Gold was able to serpentine its triumph down Market Street in
San Francisco.

In his post-graduate year in cow college, Dick devoted himself to
laboratory work and cut all lectures. In fact, he hired his own
lecturers, and spent a sizable fortune on them in mere traveling
expenses over California. Jacques Ribot, esteemed one of the greatest
world authorities on agricultural chemistry, who had been seduced from
his two thousand a year in France by the six thousand offered by the
University of California, who had been seduced to Hawaii by the ten
thousand of the sugar planters, Dick Forrest seduced with fifteen
thousand and the more delectable temperate climate of California on a
five years' contract.