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whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he’d left the campus for a short time, returned clandestinely (don’t ask me why) to confer with his protégés, and then disappeared for good. The tale was like so many others one has heard, I could almost have predicted certain features—such as that these same protégés had subsequently dedicated their lives to spreading their Mentor’s word and institutionalizing his method as they understood it; that they too were roughly used as they transferred from college to college, but won proselytes by their zeal wherever they went. Neither was it surprising to learn that this Professor Giles, this “Grand Tutor” as his son called him, never committed his wisdom to the press: what academic department has not its Grand Old Man who packs the lecture-halls term after term but never publishes a word in his field? In fact, the one unusual particular of the whole story as I heard it this first time was the not-very-creditable one that the man had got a child, by a ladymarried to someone else; otherwise it was the standard painful history of reformers and innovators.
    The problem for my visitor, then—the fruit of this illicit planting—was the common one faced by second-generation followers of any pioneer: to formulate the Master’s teaching into some readily disseminable canon, a standard and authority for the fast-swelling ranks of its adherents. By the time Stoker Giles had reached young manhood his father’s original pupils were already divided into factions; the son’s first thought had been to compile as a source-book their reminiscences of the great man’s life and tenure, but so many discrepancies, even contradictions, were made manifest in the collation, he abandoned that project. In its early stages, however, he had gone so far as to read the several texts into an automatic computer, as our fashionable classicists are fond of doing nowadays, to speed the work of comparing them—and here, gentle editors and publishers, your credulity like mine must flex its muscles for a considerable stretch.
    This remarkable computer, I was told (a gadget called WESCAC), not only pointed out in accordance with its program the hopeless disagreement of the texts; on its own hook, or by some prior instruction, it volunteered further that there was in its Storage “considerable original matter” read in fragmentarily by George Giles himself in the years of his flourishing: taped lecture-notes, recorded conferences with protégés, and the like. Moreover, the machine declared itself able and ready (with the aid of “analogue facilities” and a sophistication dismaying at least to a poor humanist like myself) to assemble, collate, and edit this material, interpolate all verifiable data from other sources such as the memoirs then in hand, recompose the whole into a coherent narrative from the Grand Tutor’s point of view, and “read it out” in an elegant form on its automatic printers! The son, as disinclined to writing as the father but apparently commanding some authority in his college, agreed, and in the face of opposition from certain “Gilesians” as well as “anti-Gilesians,” the computer made good its promise. After several false starts and program adjustments it produced a first-person chronicle of the life and teachings of the Grand Tutor, a text so faithful to the best evidence and polished in its execution that young Stoker needed only to “change a date or a place-name here and there,” as he vowed, to call it finished.
    The great test came, he told me, when he took the manuscript to one Peter Greene, an early student of Giles’s, now past sixty and the strongest critic of the “WESCAC Project.” A famous teacher in his own right by then, Greene met the youngster with a scowl and only after muchpersuasion agreed to listen to a dozen pages. Refusing even to sit, he paced the floor of