Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1918 — CLASSIC LEARNING MADE PAY [ARTICLE]

CLASSIC LEARNING MADE PAY

Professor’s Acquaintance With the Language Enabled Him to Squelch Shine Shop Comment. The Professor’s Greek is the Greek of Homer and Pindar, as far as the professor’s studies have enabled him to get it ; but he can speak it well enough, and enough like the modern idiom, to make himself understood in bootblack shops. He has even traveled through Greece with it and got along fairly well. The professor’s salary is no larger than other professors’ salaries; or perhaps he is a war economist. At any rate, the sizable - feet at the ends of his muscular young legs are encased in very ancient half-soled shoes. The other morning he stopped on Sixth avenue, muses a New York correspondent, to have these shoes shined up. The Greek boys were full of ginger; they were swapping jokes on their patrons in their native tongue. “A tightwad,” or its equivalent, said the professor’s servitors to the others. “A miser. Probably a wife-beater too” —and went on to discuss the professor’s outward aspect in detail. “Look at these shabby shoes,” was his peroration. And then the professor spoke Greek. “If I lifted my foot to your face,” he said suavely, “perhaps you could see them still better.” “I had to pay the cashier,” says the professor telling the story. “The boy was out of the shop and about three blocks up the avenue, still running. The shop was strangely silent. Some day I must go in there again and find out if that boy came back.” Reason does not come before years.