The Old Reporter
"I received my schooling abroad," he always took pains to add. "Spent most of my boyhood over there with relatives. Have to rely upon my forebears for my general culture, I reckon; though your Alma Mater's biological department holds that acquired characteristics are not transmitted, I believe. My family were nearly all lawyers and clergymen, or professors at the University—the University of Virginia, that is. That's where they wanted me to go, too, but—" and then he would quote a line of Horace. Billy always quoted Latin in his first conversation with "college men." Let us hope the collegians always understood him. …
The collegians in the young Billy Woods's first assignment looked like, for the most part, rather pleasant-looking down-town types. Some of them seemed to the older reporters to have smug faces with fat on their necks, and others to be of the narrow-shouldered, neurasthenic New York sort, who couldn't lean back and smoke calmly, and many were very good fellows. They were all mysterious and awful to the new reporter who sat in the back of the room
224
