Up the Street/Chapter 1

HERE once lived in Olympus, Ohio, a gentleman whose hobby was archæology. Given a college education and a less energetic set of ancestors, this gentleman might have worn the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, and addressed learned societies on matters of paramount unimportance; but, lacking the education, and goaded relentlessly by his heritage of Yankee blood, he merely accumulated a substantial fortune in the manufacture of perforated union suits, and eventually donated to the local public library a few hundred volumes of which no one in town save the Unitarian clergyman understood so much as the meaning of the titles.

Toward the zenith of his life this Olympian gentleman married slowly and wisely, as all his friends had expected, and took his bride on a trip around the world. It was his first opportunity to view the land he loved, and he made the most of it. An unheralded revision of the tariff summoned him back to Olympus from the plain of ancient Troy, where he was reveling in antiquity and corrupting the natives with double tips; and although he promptly forgot his disappointment, and busied himself with the vital problem of finding a cheap substitute for sea-island cotton, yet he retained enough of the Old World impression to name his only child from sentiment. It was to have been either Hector or Helen, and Hector seemed more appropriate to the sex.

From the very moment when Hector Blanding spoke his first authentic syllable—which his mother didn't live to hear—his father took up the task of making a scholar of him, whether he liked it or not. At the mature age of ten, Hector was constantly subject to the mental suggestion that a college professor is the noblest work of man; and that the Blanding trade-mark, which now adorned the backs of a million or two good American citizens, was in future to embellish their intellects. The arbiter of his son's destiny succeeded in getting him into Harvard, and the optician's at about the same time; and lived just long enough to see him take his A. B. with highest honors, and to observe with less interest a further degree which the newspapers printed L. H. B. It stood for left half back, and meant that Hector was worthy of his name. While his father had developed his brain, nature had looked after his muscles; so that he was possessed of a vast body as well as a vast mind, and when he exercised them simultaneously, he helped create some contemporary history, and taught the smaller New England colleges the virtue of playing eight or nine men on the rush line.

At the news of his father's sudden death, which came at the end of his third year of graduate work, Hector went back to Olympus by the limited, and found that he was heir to some two hundred thousand dollars, and a sacred trust. The last words of Blanding, senior, were simple, and to the point.

"Tell him," he had whispered to the Unitarian clergyman, who would understand, "tell him I don't care a darn how rich he is—I want him to be famous! Celebrated! Tell him I couldn't be. He's got to be. Not in underwear—academic! I want his name a household word!"

Hector, perceiving that his duty obviously lay in the field of archæology, and considering the two hundred thousand dollars as a sort of conditional bequest, hung his varsity sweater in the hall closet of the Blanding home, and, as soon as he deemed proper, began to play tennis at the country club every morning to keep himself healthy while he wrote a book. He wrote it in Olympus partly because the necessary references were at hand, and partly because he wanted to be quiet. The book was dedicated to Cyrus H. P. Blanding, and the title was "The History of Carthage from Mummius to Herodes Atticus."

And that stumped even the clergyman.