Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/106

104 ness for Pseudoneuroptera springs from either physical resemblance or spiritual affinity; though the contrary argument—that the insects are of the tribe Sociala, which precludes any possibility of kinship between us, since I am inclined to be misanthropic—is equally ridiculous. I need only point out the difference in size. My physical proportions are those of homo sapiens, overly developed as to occiput and frontal bone; and my mustache, despite the innuendoes of my enemies, bears no similarity to a white ant's antennae. There can be no kinship between a sixty-nine-year-old professor, five feet eleven inches tall (cut now to five feet eight by excessive stooping), crowning genus of the vertebrate class, Mammalia, and a Pseudoneuroptera with compound rounded eyes and an abdomen of nine distinct segments.

Corker answered my polite cablegram most insultingly. Termitarioum still here stop.

Would you like to buy it query it should make you congenial home. Corker.

His tone incensed me, as it would any man with proper pride. Bearing the offensive message in my hand, I presented myself post haste at the quarters of our college president, Warburton Harrell. Brushing past the telephone attendant and entering Harrell's inner office unannounced (a procedure necessitated by the girl's ineradicable habit of saying the president is out when I know he is in, I was just in time to see his private door into the hall swing shut. I dashed in pursuit; the president, evidently in great haste, was rushing down the crowded hall with his bowler clapped askew on his head. He did not seem to hear my shouts, though once he looked over his shoulder and almost ran down a startled coed. He has become quite deaf of recent years, and sometimes has failed to notice my loudest halloos.

ARRELL took the Administration Building steps three at a time, with me close at his heels, and leaped into his car. Fortunately it refused to start immediately, the motor being cold. I say "fortunately", because I know the president would have been much chagrined to miss me. He has said many times that my constant indictments of fellow professors show him perfectly what he has to put up with from his faculty.

"Well well, Whitehead," he said, giving over his effort to start the coupe as I deposited myself on the seat beside him, "May I—ah—drop you somewhere? Anywhere at all would be a pleasure."

"Not just now," I told him, secretly pleased at his marked graciousness; "though if ever I'm in need of transportation, I'll not hesitate to let you know."

Harrell said he was sure of that, and I showed him the cablegram.

"It is time," I stated, "that this jackanapes Corker was put in his place. Imagine pretending that a termitarium could endure unharmed from the Miocene period to the present! The college should reprimand him for sensationalism."

"Whitehead," said the persidentpresident [sic], "I have a better idea than that." He paused, then continued ambiguously, "Don't you think you need a rest? If it weren't that my predecessor gave you a life contract here, you'd have started resting the day I arrived. Conditions being what they are, the