Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock Page B

monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyes had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer had tracked him out for a benefaction to the University, and that all resistance was hopeless.
    When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capitalist’s desk his famous pamphlet on the “Use of the Greek Pluperfect,” it was as if an Arabian sultan had sent the fatal bow-string to a condemned pasha, or Morgan the buccaneer had served the death-sign on a shuddering pirate.
    So they came nearer and nearer, shouldering the passers-by. The sound of them as they talked was like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard it. Never did Castor and Pollux come surging into battle as Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster bore down upon the Grand Palaver Hotel.
    Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, had hesitated about going to the university. The university was coming to him. As for those millions of his, he could take his choice – dormitories, apparatus, campuses, buildings, endowment, anything he liked – but choose he must. And if he feared that after all his fortune was too vast even for such a disposal, Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up ancient Mitylene, or modern Smyrna, or the lost cities of the Plain of Pactolus. If the size of the fortune troubled him Dr. Boomer would dig him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for more.
    But if Destiny held all this for Tomlinson in its outstretched palm before it, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its toga.
    There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold that they mined.
    For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria University drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior professor of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened laboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him. Nor were the labels that he marked, as sample followed sample in the tests, the same as those of the previous marking. Not by any means.
    And his grave face as he worked in silence was as still as the stones of the post-tertiary period.

THE ARRESTED PHILANTHROPY OF MR. TOMLINSON
    “T his, Mr. Tomlinson, is our campus,” said President Boomer as they passed through the iron gates of Plutoria University.
    “For camping?” said the Wizard.
    “Not exactly,” answered the president, “though it would, of course, suit for that.
Nihil humanum alienum
, eh?” and he broke into a loud, explosive laugh, while his spectacles irradiated that peculiar form of glee derived from a Latin quotation by those able to enjoy it. Dr. Boyster, walking on the other side of Mr. Tomlinson, joined in the laugh in a deep, reverberating chorus.
    The two had the Wizard of Finance between them, and they were marching him up to the University. He was taken along much as is an arrested man who has promised to go quietly. They kept their hands off him, but they watched him sideways through their spectacles. At the least sign of restlessness they doused him with Latin. The Wizard of Finance, having been marked out by Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster as a prospective benefactor, was having Latin poured over him to reduce him to the proper degree of plasticity.
    They had already put him through the first stage. They had, three days ago, called on him at the Grand Palaver and served him with a pamphlet on “The Excavation of Mitylene” as a sort of writ. Tomlinson and his wife had looked at the pictures of the ruins, and from the appearance of them they judged that Mitylene was in Mexico, and they said that it was a shame to see it in that state and that the United States ought to intervene.
    As the second stage on the path of philanthropy, the Wizard of Finance was now being taken to look at the university. Dr. Boomer knew by experience that no rich man could look at it without wanting to give it money.
    And here the president had found