Read "The Delectable Mountains" by Arthur Willis Colton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I was a student then and lived on the second floor of a brick dormitory with foot-worn stones and sagging casements. The windows looked across one end of the campus on ivy-covered walls of other buildings, on a bronze statue whose head was bent to indicate that the person represented had taken life seriously in his day. Near at hand was a street of unacademic noises, horse-cars, shops, German bands, newsboys, people who bought and sold without higher mathematics and seldom mentioned Horatius Flaccus.
But there were drifts and eddies of the street that would turn aside and enter the dormitories commercially. Tobin was one of these. He came to my door by preference, because of the large crack in the panel. For, if one entered the dormitory commercially and knocked at the doors, one never knew -- it might be Horatius Flaccus, a volume of size and weight. But with a crack in the panel one could stand outside at ease and dignity, looking through it, and crying, "_M'las ca-andy!_ Peanuts!" Then, if anything arrived, without doubt it arrived. A man might throw what he chose at his own door.