STANFORD STORIES

TALES OF A YOUNG UNIVERSITY

BY

CHARLES K. FIELD [CAROLUS AGER]

AND

WILL H. IRWIN

ILLUSTRATED



NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1900

Copyright, 1900, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

BLANCHARD PRESS, NEW YORK.

* * * * *

DEDICATION.

"To the newest born of the Sisters, At the end of the race's march, In her quaint, old Spanish garment, Pillar and tile and arch; Awaiting the age that hallows, Her face to the coming morn— Whose scholars still walk in her cloisters, Whose martyrs are yet unborn."

"We scatter down the four wide ways, Clasp hands and part, but keep The power of the golden days To lull our care asleep, And dream, while our new years we fill With sweetness from those four, That we are known and loved there still, Though we come back no more."



PREFATORY NOTE.

These are stories of the University as it was before the era of new buildings. While the attempt has been made to create, in character, incident and atmosphere, a picture of Stanford life, the stories, as stories, are fiction, with the exception of "Pocahontas, Freshman," and "Boggs' Election Feed," which were suggested by local occurrences, and "One Commencement," which is mainly fact. The original draft of "His Uncle's Will" was printed in The Sequoia with the title "The Fate of Freshman Hatch."

It may be necessary to add that, in the endeavor to present the actual life of the University, it has seemed quite inadvisable to edit the conversation of the characters from the standpoint of the English purist. Since, however, those readers who boggle over slang could hardly be much interested in the Undergraduate, it is sufficient merely to call attention to the point.



CONTENTS.

PAGE A Midwinter Madness, 3

Pocahontas, Freshman, 29

His Uncle's Will, 55

The Initiation of Dromio, 77

The Substituted Fullback, 91

Two Pioneers and an Audience, 119

For the Sake of Argument, 135

An Alumni Dinner, 171

Boggs' Election Feed, 185

In the Dark Days, 207

Crossroads, 223

A Song Cycle and a Puncture, 249

One Commencement, 265



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAST THE LONELY REDWOOD TREE TO THE UNIVERSITY, Frontispiece

... TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS, Facing page 148

A STROLL IN THE MOONLIT QUAD, PLANNED TO INTEREST THE CROWD AT THE TUESDAY EVENING LECTURE, Facing page 154

... THEN THE LULL DURING CLASS, Facing page 200



A MIDWINTER MADNESS.



STANFORD STORIES.



A Midwinter Madness.

Genius has been defined as a capacity for taking pains.

When a college man's good fairy makes her first call at his cradle, she may bestow upon him the football instinct, with muscles to match; no fairy could do more. But if she bumps up against Heredity, and is powerless to give him the supreme gift, she may compensate for it in a degree by leaving the kind of larynx and tympanum used in the Glee Club. Failing this, she may render next best service by throwing a mandolin in his way and bewitching his parents into paying for lessons. Some twenty years later, behind the enchanted scenes of a specially hired theater, or on the polished floor of society's inner temple, he may think of the fairy kindly.

Doubtless, all theatrical life means drudgery, but the Christmas tour of the Glee and Mandolin clubs is drudgery amidst bowers of roses. The hard-working professional would call it play; yet, even in this gilded stage-life, there is the common affliction of being forced to appear at every concert, and in places you don't care about—unless, of course, you happen to be seriously ill.

The Clubs had just done an abbreviated stunt for the Los Angeles High School the afternoon before Christmas. The occasion was a big ad., but they ripped matters through in a hurry, because the social event of the trip came that afternoon—Lillian Arnold's reception at her home on Figuerroa Street.

At Hacienda Arnold there is running water along the garden copings, and the grounds are large. It was bud-time, and the heavy fragrance of the orange blossoms mingled with the bitter-almond smell of oleanders. Miss Arnold served her refreshments on the lawn, and the girls looked peachy in plume-laden hats and filmy organdies. The day was rather warm for December. To this out-door reception came the prettiest girl in Los Angeles, Dolores Payson; her full name, she confided to Cecil Van Dyke that evening with a slight but captivating roll of her Andalusian eyes and r's, was Dolores Ynez Teresa Payson. Van Dyke was the only man on the trip who had thought to bring his summer togs, and he looked very swell. Van played first mandolin and was notoriously susceptible. It is down in the Club annals that she caught his game at first sight.

Had she been given to genealogical investigation, the name Van Dyke might have recalled to this descendant of many hidalgos that foggy battle-field in the Netherlands on which her ancestor and his took pot-shots at each other with the primitive cross-bow. Motley records that on that day far-gone Holland laid low the Spaniard. The present historian is forced to chronicle the final triumph of Spain. The only bow used in this last encounter was in the hands of a mythological person whose existence is doubted only by scoffers.

They tried a dance or two in the crowded rooms, they strolled out into the gardens, they ate ices under the roses in a secluded arbor. The place, the time, the air had their influence on Van Dyke. He was from Montana, where the magnolias do not shed their waxen petals at Christmas, and the gold-of-Ophir roses sternly refuse to leaf until the Fourth of July.

Perhaps he might have withstood all the seductive charms of the hour if he had not escorted Dolores home and essayed to bid her good-bye. There was a great clump of flaming poinsettia at the Payson gate. Dolores was dark, with a rich southern complexion; her dress was white. So she stood against the poinsettia. That is why there is more to this story.

Van Dyke meditated as he went into town. She was the finest girl he had ever met. It was a hard graft, this playing one day in a live town where one could meet charming people, and being forced to take the train next morning for some uninteresting country place where they would have to lounge around a cheap hotel until concert time. Why couldn't the manager get up a schedule that would give them a day or so longer in a place like Los Angeles? This making a college trip with the sole idea of money-getting was degrading. He, for one, was willing enough to pay his share of the extra expense.

On his way he stopped at a florist's. It was a habit he had acquired under similar circumstances. He was puzzled to know just what to send in a land where the highways and hedges run riot with flowers, but he finally selected some wonderful orchids of delicate lavender and mauve. Purposely, he put no card with them, feeling that she would guess the sender.

He got into his dress clothes in rather an ungracious humor. Pomona was the next place, a fruit town further south. Oh, it was too bad! Well, at least he would see her again at the concert that night. He was grateful for this much. Her seat was on an aisle, she told him; he would be able to speak to her during the intermission; more than this, she had said, in her best convent manner, that he might ride home with her papa and mamma afterwards.

Still, this was an unsatisfactory way of carrying on an affair of the sort, especially when it was the first really serious one he had ever had. Clean out of Van's mind had faded the memory of a Montana cow-girl, a San Francisco actress, a senior in the Lambda Mu sorority, a——but space forbids. He mussed three ties. Freshmen are petulant things.

Perkins, who led the Mandolin Club, joshed him at dinner.

"What's the matter, my boy; didn't you have a good time this afternoon?"

"Of course he didn't," answered a guitar man. "You must have noticed his bored expression all through; that is, when you saw him at all."

"That was merely the blase look that comes with four months at the Youngest and Best," said "Cap." Smith. "The Freshman was happy on his little inside because he was so well got up. He really looked the part; now he's in ordinary clothes, like a common strolling player, and he feels cross."

"No," growled Van Dyke, "I've caught cold or something."

"Oh," said Phillips, the Glee Club leader. He took up his table fork and bit the end; holding it to his ear he gave the table a starting chord, and they hummed "Ma Onliest One," while Van grew red, and the rest of the dining-room stopped to listen.

Dolores Payson sat in an orchestra seat and smiled up at the immaculate Mr. Van Dyke, above the only bunch of orchids in the theatre. He came to chat with her during the interval between "La Czarina" and "Schneider's Band." She was doubly guarded by her father on one side and her mother on the other. It was a way they had. She introduced him demurely with an adorable little wave of her black fan. He wondered if, should he quit college right away, he could get a job which would enable him to support a wife. He looked at the placid, olive-skinned mother, not yet old enough to be very fat, and decided that he could; his glance wandered to the angular, sharp-featured American father, and he was sure he couldn't.

Van could not remember ever having seen such great, dark liquid eyes as now melted into his. It seemed hard not to behold them again for a whole week. Hard? It was impossible. It was dreadful to leave her for the little time while the mandolin club was on the stage. On his way up the aisle his freshman brain was seized and overmastered by a brilliant idea; he almost stopped to pat himself on the shoulder.

Going into one of the dressing rooms, he sank dejectedly on a chair and pressed his hand to his forehead. Perkins, gathering in his musicians for the next piece, found him there.

"Come along, Freshie."

The first mandolin rose slowly.

"What's the matter?" asked the leader.

"Oh, nothing," said the other, "I'll be all right."

After the piece he went back to the dressing-room.

"Encore!" cried Perkins, rushing in.

"I can't help it," said Van, in a contracted tone, "I can't go on."

"Why not?" demanded Perkins.

"I'm in awful pain, Ted," pleaded Van. "Something I've eaten, I guess. I can hardly stand up straight."

"Oh, rats!" answered Perkins sympathetically, and tore out again.

Van took his coat and mandolin and disappeared. Between numbers he came in and slipped down the aisle to the Paysons' seats.

"Will you excuse me, Miss Payson? I can't go home with you after the concert. I'm awfully sorry, but I feel pretty sick and I'm going back to the hotel now."

"Oh, what is it?" Dolores asked, and her mother leaned forward with polite interest.

Van smiled weakly.

"Nothing serious, probably," he said. "Don't worry, please. I won't say good-bye," he added, taking Dolores' hand, "because if I have to stay over to-morrow I shall try to see you in the morning."

"Oh, I hope you'll be better, and I shall look for you."

Then Mason came out to sing, and Van left with a hurried good-night. The streets were full of Christmas shoppers. At the first drug store he bought some Jamaica ginger; then he went to the hotel and slid into bed, leaving the lights on.

After the concert Perkins did not go to the cafe with the rest; he, too, hastened back to the hotel.

"I'll bet he's at the Payson ranch this minute," he thought, as he made for Van's room, but the sick musician was lying on his face, breathing heavily.

"Well, what's the matter, anyway?" said Perkins, his suspicions fading.

"I don't know," groaned Van. "It came on all of a sudden at the theatre. The pain is here on my right side. Gee whiz, it knocks me out!"

"Shan't I get a doctor?" asked the leader. "What do you think it is?"

"Of course," moaned the sufferer, "it may be appendicitis,—I don't think that could hurt more,—but it can hardly be anything like that. I've taken the ginger, and it will set me up, probably."

"You ought to have a doctor look at you, though. It's dangerous to put it off," urged Perkins.

"No," said Van. "I'll stick it out to-night, and if I'm not better to-morrow, why, you may get one. Never mind me, Ted. Where is the gang?"

"They're all down in the Grotto."

"Go on and join them; don't stay here, it isn't necessary. I'll be all right, I say, and I can ring if I'm not. Come in in the morning, won't you?"

"Sure. The train goes at ten-fifteen, you know. We can't get along without you very well."

"Oh, I'll be fit in the morning. So long, old man."

"Good-night," and Perkins shut the door.

The Freshman lay still awhile, then got up and, smiling broadly, turned out the lights and tumbled back to sleep.

Meanwhile Perkins joined the men at the restaurant.

"Van Dyke is sick," he said. "I've just been up in his room."

"What's the matter?"

"We don't know. He's afraid it's appendicitis."

"I'll tell you what it is," said Mason, the baritone; "it's heart trouble. I wouldn't believe that man Van under a triple oath, if there were a skirt in the case."

"You won't have to search far in this case," laughed a deep bass voice behind a cool stein.

"Oh, I don't think so," protested Perkins; "he looked bad, bad. I think it's square enough."

"Don't you believe him a minute. I'll bet it's a fake, pure and simple."

"He couldn't expect to work one on us."

"Why not? The time the Mandolin Club went North with the Berkeley Glee somebody played the same blooming game. It worked all right then and they joshed the life out of the leader, too. I heard Shirlock tell about it."

The Freshman should never have allowed himself to go to sleep so easily. By the time Perkins and Mason tiptoed up to his room, he was sprawled out on his back, snoring with a healthfulness that was positively vulgar. Mason gave the leader a significant punch and drew him down the hall to his room.

"See here, Perk," he said, "if he keeps up that gag to-morrow I have a scheme that is a pipe."

The invalid wore a woe-begone expression when the two fellows went in before breakfast.

"Are you any better?" asked Perkins.

"No," said Van, miserably. "The pain is just as bad. I guess I'll have to see a doctor after all."

"How did you sleep?" inquired Perkins.

"Bum. My fever was high all night," moaned the sufferer. "I heard you fellows come up, and I hoped someone might drop in. I suppose you were all too sleepy."

"Yes," said Mason, with a side look at Perkins, "everybody went right to sleep."

"Well," said the leader, "we'll go down to breakfast now, and then we will get a doctor to see you before we have to go."

Neither of them stopped to eat. They hurried first to the Polyclinic. There Perkins asked for the name of one or two physicians who were known to have little practice, and who could afford to take charge of a man who would require constant attention for a week, a middle-aged person preferred.

The man in charge gave them three names and addresses. They went first to a Doctor Mead, who displayed his shingle in a quiet street. He was a big, slow-spoken man, somewhat shabbily dressed.

Jimmy Mason approached him with such hesitation in his voice as befitted the part he was playing. They wanted the doctor on a delicate matter, he explained; it was a private affair which lay very near to them, Perkins added.

"You see," said Jimmy, "we're all cut up. Poor little devil——" and his voice broke artistically, while Perkins forebore to grin.

"Perhaps the case is not so grave as it seems," said the doctor, with professional calm.

"I don't see how it could be any worse." Jimmy controlled his emotion with an effort. "If it were just common sickness, but—but he's lost some of his buttons—bughouse, crazy you know,—" his giggle turned into a sob again, and Perkins, bearing up under his trouble, took the thread of the story.

"You see, Doctor, we are musicians from Stanford, travelling through here; something has happened to one of our party; I don't know what's the matter: some hallucination."

"It struck him first at Santa Barbara," said Mason. "He thought that he was very ill one evening when he was tired; said he was sure he was coming down with appendicitis. We sent for Doctor——"

"Brown," filled in Perkins with presence of mind.

"A very able man; he stands high in the profession," said the doctor gravely.

All three being thus established on a common basis of mendacity, the head liar proceeded:

"The doctor couldn't find anything the matter, but the boy—he's only a Freshman, you see—he raised Cain that night; next day he said he was as well as ever. It's been like that ever since, Doctor. One hour he's himself and then he goes to bed and swears he's sick and wants medicines. We didn't get onto him until last night, when the poor kid got to acting loco at the concert."

Perkins played chorus at discreet intervals.

"I haven't telegraphed to his people because I wouldn't distress them till we knew. We must go on with the trip now, and we can't spare any of our men because we took no substitutes; we strike this place again in a week. You will be paid well for any services, and furnished a room at the hotel. Now, Doctor, can you arrange with your patients so that he will have your undivided time?"

("Bet you haven't any to arrange with," was the unspoken thought of both men.)

Dr. Mead pondered.

"We come to you," Jimmy put in, "because we need someone on whom we can rely, a man of skill and tact."

"It happens," said the doctor after minutes of profound deliberation, "that I have no necessary calls to make until Saturday this week. What I have to do can be managed over the telephone, and I presume patients can call upon me at the hotel as well as here. Now, what are the exact particulars of your friend's aberration?"

"Can you walk up to the hotel with us, Doctor?" asked Mason, looking at his watch. "Our train leaves at ten-fifteen; we have very little time left."

On the way the two gave to the unfortunate Freshman such peculiarities, idiosyncrasies and hallucinations as seemed good; they warned the physician that he must never be left alone, and that he ought to be humored to the top of his bent in regard to his fancied attack of appendicitis.

"Then it's understood?" said Mason, as they came down the hall toward Van Dyke's room. "Of course we can't speak of the matter before him."

"Yes," said the doctor, "I think I can manage everything. You will explain to the clerk in the office the peculiar character of your friend's illness, and I shall have no trouble, I am sure."

"All right," said Perkins, and they entered. There were several of the club in the room saying good-bye. At the entrance of the physician they filed out.

"Where have you the most pain, Mr. Van Dyke?" began Dr. Mead.

"Here," said Van, without a blush.

The physician pressed his fingers upon the afflicted region, felt Van's pulse and forehead and gravely examined his tongue; then he turned to the two men and said:

"It is probably appendicitis. The boy must stay in bed for the present."

"Hate to leave you, Van," Mason said, taking the sick man's hand gently; "but it's almost train time. Take care of yourself and do as the doctor says, and you'll be O. K."

"Good-bye, old man," said Perkins. "Have 'em telegraph right along; we shall want to know just how you are. We shall have to cut the string quartet, and that's pretty hard with Pellams out of the trip, but don't feel bad about that. You'll be nifty by the time we are on for the return concert."

"Good-bye," said the man with appendicitis, assuming the look of one who may be taking his last farewell of earthly things. "I shall come out all right, I'm sure I shall."

"Course. Good-bye. Doctor, look out for him."

"Send up some paper from the office, will you?" murmured the Freshman wearily. "I—I think I want to write to my mother."

Ten minutes later the bell-boy brought the paper and a Bible.

Dr. Mead arranged the bedclothes with a practised hand, then he sent out for medicine and chatted affably until the stuff arrived. Van submitted to a plaster on his abdomen and alternated messes for half-hour intervals. He was contented enough. Early afternoon would be a good time to find Dolores.

The doctor settled himself by the window and talked about the University and politics and climatic conditions in Montana and California; the musician joined in the conversation politely but without great enthusiasm, wondering when the man was going; there was not any too much time now for breakfast and a careful toilet. He ventured to speak.

"If you have other patients that call you, Doctor, you mustn't stay with me. I can get along, even if it is lonely in a hotel, and you'll be in again to-day, won't you?"

"Appendicitis," said the doctor, with his heaviest air, "is not a thing to be treated lightly. Just now you are in a critical condition inasmuch as we are not sure what turn your trouble may take. You are likely to be seized suddenly with the usual symptoms: then an operation will be an immediate necessity. I have the needed instruments right here in my valise, and I can give you relief at once. If, however, I should leave you, I might not be within reach until serious complications had time to arise; for that reason I shall be obliged to watch you through to-day. Afterwards it may not be necessary."

This speech fairly paralyzed the man in bed. Had he done this artistic bit of acting for the purpose of spending his Christmas on the flat of his back talking to a prosy old doctor? He lay still, trying to think what answer could be made to this physician who told him seriously that he had appendicitis. He put out a feeler.

"That medicine of yours is the real thing. The pain is very much less now."

Dr. Mead looked at him over his glasses.

"Is it entirely gone?"

"Yes," answered Van, cheerily, "it certainly is."

"That is a dangerous symptom. The plaster should have drawn the pain to the surface, but not stopped it. That numbness is exactly what I wished to avoid."

He rose and poured out medicine from another bottle. Van nearly choked in swallowing this. It was eleven o'clock. Sounds of Christmas revelry floated even into his secluded upper room. The bells were telling to the people of the City of the Angels their message of peace on earth, good will toward men; they were dinning into the ears of the victim of a modern disease the fact that he ought at that moment to be waiting for Dolores on her pious way to Mission Los Angeles. He pictured her with some ancient missal in her slender hands, and flanked on one side by her sympathetic duenna of a mother. The certainty that her American father would be safe at home did not detract from the charm of the situation.

"The drinks seem to be on me!" thought he after his next dose. The sun of southern California was shining brightly out of doors; it must be a glorious day at Westlake Park. The bedclothes were warm and irksome, and that confounded plaster had begun to itch. If he was ever to see Dolores again he should have to make a clean breast of the whole thing.

He sat up.

"Say, Doctor, I haven't appendicitis at all; I am as well as I ever was. I just put this up as a joke on the fellows because I wanted to stay in town instead of going farther south. I've imposed on you, I'm sorry to say. I haven't any pain whatever. I was faking."

"Yes," said the doctor, soothingly, "I knew you were, but you are not well at all, my boy, and my advice to you is to stay right there in bed. You have appendicitis symptoms in spite of there being no pain, and you might do yourself no end of harm by getting up now. I wouldn't let any man go out of doors after taking that belladonna for the world. It would be suicidal."

"But, Doctor, I'm not sick, I tell you; I feel out of sight," and Van threw off the clothes and was about to spring out, plaster and all.

Dr. Mead thought it time to act.

"Get back in there," he said, quietly but firmly. He was a man of powerful physique and Van thought it best to obey until he could reason with him.

"I know what I am talking about, young man," he went on, "and you must listen to me. I want you to stay in bed."

This was too much.

"I'll be hanged if I will!" shouted the patient, preparing to rise.

"Keep covered up!" ordered the doctor. He had a big, deep voice. He stood a little way off, with his forefinger pointed at the student, sighting over it with a cold, gray eye. Something in his manner began to frighten Van. He shivered under the bedclothes. A hideous story which he had read about a maniac barber came into his mind with sickening effect. The man's whole appearance, all his actions, his eager grasping of the appendicitis theory, proclaimed insanity. He meant to operate on him, whether or no! There were the surgical instruments in that black bag on the bureau, and he was shut up in the room with the whole crazy outfit! He would have given his soul to be in Pomona with the club.

"All right, Doctor," he said weakly, sliding a little farther down into the bed, "I'll do just as you say. Only I wish you'd ring and see if any mail has come for me."

The boy who answered the doctor's call was an athletic young fellow. Van thought that between them they could manage the maniac; so he sprang out crying, "Quick! This man is crazy. Help me get him down!"

To his surprise the boy seized him and deposited him back in bed.

"What in thunder is the matter with you people?" shouted Van. "I'm not going to stay here with that man when there's nothing the matter with me!"

"There, there," coaxed the boy, "you're all right, sir; try to go to sleep, can't you?"

Then Van turned over to the wall and wept salt Freshman tears, and the awe-struck boy gently closed the door. And Cupid, with his wings folded over his little arms, sat upon the bureau and laughed long and cynically.

It was now past twelve o'clock. Church was over, and Dolores was returning. Home-ward gently she rode with surging thoughts in her bosom, and an expression of sweet, religious calm hovering over her straight black brows. That was the Spanish of her. The moment the front door closed behind her she sprinted for the telephone. That was the American of her.

Had Papa Payson not been absorbed in the forty-eight-page Christmas edition of the Los Angeles Herald, he might have overheard the following semi-conversation:

"——"

"Main eight-double-eight."

"——"

"Yes."

"——"

"Is this the Westminster?"

"——"

"Will you—er—that is—did the Stanford Glee Club leave this morning?"

"——"

"Oh! Will you tell me, please, whether Mr. Cecil Van Dyke left with them?"

"——"

"Oh, I'm so sorry! What's the matter?"

"——"

"Appendicitis!" The receiver dropped and swung against the wall. Dolores had fled to mamma.

Perkins and Mason, treating each other at every station short of the prohibition town of Pomona, would have felt less complacent over their little joke had they seen the procession that left the Hotel Westminster at one-thirty P. M. on that balmy Christmas day. The order of march, as instituted by the American Dolores, was as follows:

1. The Payson carriage, with Mrs. and Miss Payson on the forward seat and a tenderly wrapped Freshman on the other, and the coachman instructed to drive gently.

2. Dr. Mead and the devoted bell-boy in a phaeton.

3. Small citizens on foot.

The doctor, obeying to the letter the orders of Perkins, who had commanded him not to leave his patient for one moment, smiled broadly as he gathered the lunatic into his arms and bore him past the fatal poinsettia bushes and up the broad steps where the grave major-domo was waiting to receive them. The scale upon which the Payson household was conducted just suited the ideas of that worthy practitioner.

* * * * *

On Saturday, Perkins and Mason asked at the hotel for Van Dyke and the doctor.

"They gave up their rooms last Monday, not very long after you left," said the clerk. "A lady took your friend to her house."

"Who was she?" asked Jimmy, with dark foreboding.

"A Mrs. Payson."

Perkins collapsed on his suit-case. Jimmy made for the desk and began to scan the directory.

"What are you looking for?"

"The P's. I'm going to haze that rattle-weeded Freshman and slay the doctor."

When the two defeated joshers paused inside the Payson gate, a scene of touching domesticity met their gaze. Under a jasmine-covered corner of the piazza, nestling in the depths of a great easy chair, lay Freshman Van Dyke. Senorita Dolores, in the role of ministering angel, was bending unnecessarily close. Dr. Mead, as near his patient as was consistent with delicacy, was lounging in a hammock, and smoking a good cigar. It is a tradition in Los Angeles clubdom that John Payson imports his cigars direct. In the middle-distance, Mrs. Payson was approaching with a cup of nourishing beef-tea.

Jimmy Mason, afraid to trust himself to the expression of his thoughts in the presence of ladies, was about to vanish gracefully, but Van Dyke caught sight of them.

"Hello, fellows. Hear you had a frost in San Diego," cried he.

"You must be very much better—able to be moved, I notice," with a look in Jimmy's eyes that pointed to future trouble.

"Oh," said the Freshman, "almost recovered. I've had the very best of care—and a very satisfactory nurse," and for the last time, in this story, he gazed into those Andalusian eyes.

"But not the nurse we engaged," said the aggrieved Perkins.

"No," said Van, "this young lady was engaged only last evening."

"S-sh," said Senora Payson, pointing to the open window, "Papa may hear you."



POCAHONTAS, FRESHMAN.



Pocahontas, Freshman.

"But when they lookt round for the Ladye Pocahontas, she hadde gone to her Yorke woodes, weepyng they saye."

ROWE'S LIFE OF POCAHONTAS.

I.

To begin with, the college never called her Pocahontas to her face, and no one would have found anything pat in the name until a long-remembered spring afternoon in her Freshman year. After that day, although her instructors still registered her as Hannah Grant Daly, she was generally known as "Pocahontas." Students with visitors would point her out in the Quad. "That's the girl they call Pocahontas." Then they would tell briefly her story. She knew through her room-mate that the college had nicknamed her, and she grieved over it. She did not know that John Smith himself never called her Pocahontas; she had never dared to look at him since the day they had named her.

Early in September the noon train brought her through the oaks and the burdened olive orchards, past the lonely redwood Tree to the University. The brakeman's call: "Next station is Palo A-al-to!" stirred her with fluttering excitement. The crowded carriages and people at the station bewildered her. Eager 'busmen struggled for the hand-baggage of strangers, men with "Student Transfer" on their caps clamored for trunk-checks. Fellows in duck seized some of the men who came down the car steps, carrying away their suit-cases and throwing lusty student arms about their shoulders. The men thus welcomed introduced younger fellows and the whole group piled into a 'bus and shouted "Rho House, Billy," to the driver.

The man who got out just ahead of Pocahontas was greeted by cries of "Come on you Ca-ap!" and "Hello, Smithy, old boy!" He was evidently someone of whom they were very fond. One fat fellow with a comical face hugged him theatrically. Pocahontas watched them drive away, laughing and slapping one another's knees. The man they called Smithy was the nicest looking.

She had given her new valise to a gray-haired 'busman who looked a little like the minister at home. On the way up the long avenue of palms toward the sandstone buildings low in the distance, this 'busman chatted kindly with her, telling her wonderful, almost incredible things about the University, so that she began to feel a little less strange. As she paid her fare in front of the Roble he said:

"Now, whenever you want a 'bus, Miss, just ask for Uncle John. That's what they call me."

"Yes," answered the Freshman, gratefully, "I will,—Uncle John."

She passed up the dormitory steps, running awkwardly the gauntlet of experienced eyes scanning the new arrivals. The Theta Gammas wrote her down as material for a quaint little, quiet little dig,—not of sorority interest. One of them ventured that there was an Oxford teacher's Bible and an embroidered mending-case in the shiny valise. Another prophesied that the newcomer would wear her High School graduation-dress to the Freshman reception. These ladies had been at college for three years and their diagnosis was correct.

So Hannah Grant Daly hopped with no unnecessary flapping of wings upon her perch in the Roble dove-cote. The matron put her into 52 with Lillian Arnold, a Sophomore leader of local society. This was "to make things easier for her." Their wedded life lasted three days. It was long after lights when Miss Arnold returned the first night. Hannah had read her chapter and was lying awake, bravely resisting a homesick cry. Her roommate groped in with an animated tale of a Freshman spread on the top floor at which the chief attraction had been oyster cocktails. Pocahontas shuddered. In imagination she detected a faint odor like that from her mother's medicine-closet.

"I'd have asked you to go along with me," apologized Lillian, scrambling into bed without any conventional delay, "but I thought you wouldn't care for such things."

"I hope I never shall," said the new girl, solemnly, and turned her face to the wall.

The following morning while Pocahontas arranged her share of the bureau, the Sophomore draped a tennis net on their wall and fixed in its meshes the trophies of her first year. She was putting a photograph in place when Hannah spoke:

"Who is that, Miss Arnold?"

"That's Jack Smith," answered Lillian; "stunning, isn't he?"

"He's very interesting, I think. He was on the train yesterday. There were ever so many boys to meet him."

"He's a Beta Rho,—belongs to that fraternity, you know. They have a swell house here. I know most of them very well,—been over there to dinner several times."

"What class is he in?"

"Mine,—Sophomore. He's a splendid athlete,—football and pole-vaulting,—and he sings in the Glee Club. He was the only Freshman to make the team last year,—he's really a perfect hero."

"I knew he was somebody by the way they acted down at the station. I think he has a good face." The new girl had come over from the bureau and was looking up at the picture in the net.

"Everybody thinks he is the handsomest man in college. You wait till you see him in his red sweater. Don't say anything, Hannah, but I'm going to have Jack Smith for my very own this year; you see if I don't manage it," and Lillian, laughing, blew a light kiss to the photograph.

Decidedly Pocahontas disapproved of her room-mate. Later, when she found that a half-dozen girls who had dropped in after dinner were there for the evening, she went out into a music-room to look at her new text-books. Routed from here by more butterflies, with "beaux," she did her reading on a bench in the hallway. Another day and she was rooming with a Junior who was a hard student. Her departure caused Miss Arnold sincere regret. A girl she knew had roomed with a Freshman the year before and the child adored her and did the mending of both. Lillian hated to sew.

Pocahontas had been at college a week and was already learning that it is not necessary to read all your references when her room-mate, coming in from the library one evening, mentioned that there was a rush going on over at the tank.

"A rush?" asked Hannah, "what is that?"

"A relic of barbarism; they ought to have put a stop to it long ago, Professor Grind says."

"Yes," said the Freshman, "but what do they do?"

"Oh, get out and fight somehow,—I don't know just how,—something about tying up. Only another way of wasting time, Hannah," and the Junior plunged back into her Livy.

At breakfast Pocahontas heard Lillian Arnold tell about going over to the baseball diamond to see the Sophomores lying tied up beside the backstop, and what a joke it was on her own class and what a ridiculous figure Jack Smith had made in the coils of a Freshman's trunk-rope, with his face and hair all grimy with perspiration and dust, and that laundry agent, Mason, piled on top of him. Hannah left the table in secret excitement. Between recitations that morning she met Pete Halleck, a classmate from her own high school; bursting with pride, he took her up to the Row to show their very own class numerals shining high on the tank, and she realized vaguely that this was a thing of which she, too, was a part. There grew within her a longing to reach out a little toward the big, full life of the college, to know something of the men and women who lived it. All this was very wrong, she told herself, for she had come here to study hard. She had only two years in which to fit herself to teach. Here was the precious book-knowledge for which she had hungered and pinched so long. It must not be neglected, ever so little; but the enthusiasm of the boy with her was infectious. In her soul she took issue with the views of her room-mate, fortified as they were by the approval of Professor Grind.

In this rebellious mood she read on the Hall bulletin-board a notice of the reception to be given to new students by the Christian Associations. Here was a chance to satisfy that wicked craving without too great concession, for of course there would be no dancing and the auspices were so favorable. She spoke about it to Katherine Graham, a Junior, who was in Lillian Arnold's "set," to be sure, but who had put her arm around the homesick little Freshman one soft evening after dinner when the girls were strolling before the Hall, and had drawn her down the walk toward the Ninety-five Oak. Katherine was a fine, frank girl whose talk about the University and her love for the campus and its life stirred the new girl's pulses. She could listen with unguarded eagerness to this Junior because she knew her to be a student. Pocahontas slipped her arm wistfully 'round her friend's waist. To room with Miss Graham would have been perfect happiness.

"Of course you'll go," declared Katherine, when she had heard the Freshman's confidence regarding the reception. "It's slow, sometimes, but you'll meet the people you want to know."

So out came the plain graduation-dress, folded carefully away since the night she read the valedictory, three months ago; she sewed a rip in the gloves saved from the same occasion, and she took out the fan which her grandmother had given her, a wonderful fan she had considered it until she saw a few of Lillian's.

In the gymnasium where glistening bamboo and red geraniums screened the chest-weights along the walls, and feathery branches of pepper climbed luxuriantly over the inclined ladders, she found the crowd characteristic of this occasion,—the Freshman men at one end, the Freshman girls at the other, and between them a neutral zone of old students chatting gayly, oblivious of the purpose of the affair. Oh, but the reception committee! Save for these indefatigable martyrs, the Freshman sexes might have gazed wistfully at each other across the lines of upper class-men until the lights dipped and never been able to bow on the Quad next day. Important-looking persons with silk badges and worried faces circulated in a grim endeavor to "mix things up." One of these wild-eyed people would dash into the crowd and haul some struggling upper class-man over to the feminine section. With his victim in tow, he would open conversation feverishly:

"Name, please?"

"Miss Newcome."

"Ah, permit me to introduce Mr. Oldman. Miss Newcome, Mr. Oldman. Isn't it warm to-night? Fine talk of the Doctor's, wasn't it? Well, you must excuse me; we're very busy," the last words dying in the distance as he sped away.

Pocahontas contrasted this chill with the warmth of church socials at home. She felt disappointed and dreadfully alone. Her sober-minded room-mate was bobbing like a pigeon before Professor Grind, enthusiastically telling him "how much inspiration she got from his courses;" Katherine Graham was lost in a swirl of upper class-men. The Freshman had half turned toward the dressing-room when out of the press came Jack Smith, big, wholesome-looking, still smiling with some memory of his latest conversation. Why did Hannah stop? It was certainly bold,—doubtless it was half-unconscious,—but stop she did, and a committee-man, wheeling suddenly, caught Smith, dashed through the preliminaries, and the Sophomore had added Hannah Grant Daly to the list of his acquaintances.

Now "Cap" Smith had not come to this reception to meet Freshman girls—at any rate insignificant ones with spectacles and sandy hair; but no one could have told that he had not begged to be presented to this one.

"I'll have to ask you the same question we put to all," he began, smiling pleasantly; "what's your major?"

She would have given much to have answered something clever or interesting, as no doubt other girls did, but she could only stammer:

"Education."

"You've answered so promptly I'll let you off the rest of the text,—there are forty-two questions in all, each more inquisitive than the last."

The Freshman giggled; she did not know just why, unless it was that his face and merry way inspired jollity.

"Have the committee on irrigation attended to you yet?"

"I don't know; I have registered," she faltered.

He laughed, and she blushed uncomfortably.

"Oh, pardon me," he said, "I must go slow with my slang; you've had only a few days to learn it. I'm just joshing the weakness of the lemonade the Associations give us. Let's try some, though; shall we?"

They made their way to the lemonade booth. Such a vain, silly little Freshman she was, to be sweetly conscious that people looked after them as she passed along with this handsome, athletic young hero whom everybody admired. Lillian Arnold was in the booth, dividing her attention between filling glasses and entertaining four men. She gave Pocahontas a cool bow and cast a look at Smith which the Freshman interpreted "What are you doing with her?" At the same moment Lillian thought of a foolish confidence she had made to the dig when they were room-mates. Jack, however, was describing to Hannah the recent rush and the glory of her class, and Lillian's glances were lost upon him. The lemonade finished, he took the Freshman over to Professor Craig's mother, and left her with a pleasant fairy tale about meeting her again.

"Who's your friend?" laughed Perkins, as Smith dived back into his own element.

"Some little Roble dig. Don't ask me her name. I think people like that are really lonesome, Ted. Say, those Phis have trotted Haviland 'round long enough. Let's break up their interference."

Others came up to Mrs. Craig, and Hannah found herself introduced to a variety of men, but she cared little if she met no one else just then. She stood watching Jack as he passed from group to group, chaffing merrily, shaking hands with many people. There was no one else in the room so well worth watching.

That night, while the Junior breathed regularly on her side of the alcove, Pocahontas lay a long time thinking dreamily. She knew he would be like that; somehow he had looked so the first day at the station with all those noisy boys. She should have answered something more than yes and no at the reception. He would think her stupid. They had given her advanced standing in Latin; perhaps he would be in the class when it met on Monday; it would be splendid if he were; lots of the boys walked to Roble with girls at half-past-twelve; she would ask him all about the football; they would not have to talk about the Latin;—she felt so small beside him as they went along the board walk—he looked down at her and laughed—there was a seat under the Ninety-five Oak—all the other people were talking, a long way off—the lemonade bowl under the tree—shall we—

She met him on Monday morning near the Chapel. He came loafing along the arcade one arm flung about "Pellams" Chase. He looked at her good-humoredly a second, then, without recognition, glanced over her head to the girl behind her.

Hannah's heart nearly choked her. His having forgotten her was so plain, that she had not dared to bow, though she had half done so. She hoped no one had noticed her face. She bit her lips. He had not meant to do it; on the bed in her room she told herself this over and over again. Their meeting in the gymnasium had lasted less than ten minutes. It was two days ago. She was not like the other college girls he knew. Why should he remember her, having seen her once? He had been very pleasant to her at the reception. She went resolutely down to luncheon. Cap. Smith was still her hero.

II.

One day when from the fences along the pastures exultant meadow-larks were shouting "April," trilling the "r" ecstatically, and mild-hearted people were out after golden poppies, the Encina Freshmen, dark-browed plotters every villain of them, met in Pete Halleck's room. There was trouble brewing. First, Pete counted them with an air of mystery; then he pulled down the window shades, shut the transoms, and drew from the wash-stand a tangled mass of rope, two cans of paint and a coil of wire. With these beside him on the floor, he harangued the mob.

"We have got to get a rush out of 'em, fellows," he said, keeping his voice discreetly low, "and if they won't scrap, we'll force 'em. How many of you remember how to tie a knot?"

"We've had experience enough," spoke up a roly-poly boy; "it's the Sophs who need a lesson in tying."

"And we'll give it!"

Halleck drew up and looked so melodramatically important that the meeting snickered behind their collective hands. Just then there came a knock at the door. Halleck put his fingers to his lips; the crowd sat as if petrified; the roly-poly conspirator felt his bravado oozing out in youthful perspiration. The knocking came again, more imperatively, then a voice.

"Let me in, you crazy Freshies."

Silence in the room.

"Let me in. I know about you. You're all in there, talking rush. Hang your little pink skins, let me in!"

Still no answer.

"Pete Halleck, unlock your door. It's I—it's Frank Lyman, and I've something to say to you babies. Open up!"

The composite face of the gathering fell. With Lyman against them, who could be for them?—Frank Lyman, oracle of Encina and father-confessor of Freshmen!

Pete threw the paraphernalia into his wardrobe.

"The game's up, fellows."

He opened the door, admitting the Senior, and with him, alas! Sophomore Smith, President of his class. The sight of the enemy stirred Halleck.

"Say, shall we tie up the two of them?" cried he, when he had locked the door.

"Key down, Freshie, key down," said the Senior. "You boys pain me to the limit. Aren't you satisfied with tying up the Sophomores once without scrapping the whole year through?"

"What do you know about our wanting to scrap?"

"I'm on to you, Peter: You have a ton of rope and a barrel of paint somewhere about your den, and you're going out to-morrow to tie up the Sophs at the ball game. Now you fellows have had three rushes this year; when are you going to quit and give us a rest?"

Halleck held the position that delighted his soul,—center stage,—and he was a respecter of neither the Faculty nor his seniors.

"We're going to quit when we get even with you for pulling twenty-five lone Freshmen out of the Hall at night and making them rush against the whole Sophomore class; then's when we're going to quit. Observe?"

Halleck's shamefully fresh manner revived the drooping spirits of his men.

"See here, we'll call it off if you will," put in the Sophomore president.

"Yes, I guess you will," drawled Halleck. The mob howled. Smith's class was notoriously weaker at fighting than their own.

"We've rushed you three times," went on Cap; "you licked us the first time we fought; then you pulled us out in the mud the night after and did it again; but we got you the next week by strategy!"

"By a sneaking trick!"

"That's right!" chimed the Freshmen, "Pete's dead right!"

"Well, say," persisted Smith, "we're willing to quit as it is. The score stands two to one for you fellows, too."

"Two to nothing!" and again the infant class shouted approval while Lyman, the Senior, looked on amused.

"I really have a chap for you children," he said. "Just because rushing happens to be your game, you run it to death. How do you suppose the Faculty are going to look at this thing? If you want rushing choked off entirely next year, just keep on."

Airily ignoring Lyman's speech, Pete Halleck put his chin out at the Sophomore.

"Then you won't rush?"

"No," answered Cap, perfectly calm, "not even if you carry canes."

Halleck's face shone.

"Ai—i, boys, that's what we'll do! We'll get out there with canes to-morrow and we'll make 'em scrap!"

"Yes, you will! I believe it," sneered Smith. "You fellows are just fresh enough to queer yourselves that way."

"We'll queer you!" cried a valiant youngster "if you don't rush to-morrow we'll tie up your baseball team and cart 'em off to Redwood."

"Yes, sir, and we'll show you how a class president looks braided with bailing-rope,—we'll show you the pretty picture in a mirror, Mr. President,—even if we have to haul you out of the arms of twenty Roble dames."

Pete had taken his class-mates by storm and they piped acquiescence in thin Freshman voices. Smith flushed angrily.

Here Lyman interfered.

"All right, make joshes of yourselves if you want to," he said, not so good-natured as at first. "We have given you warning. Just open that door and you may go on with your little conspiracy."

"Come again when you can't stay so long," wittily yelled Pete down the hall. "I'll meet you on the field to-morrow."

"Oh, we'll be there," called back Lyman over his shoulder. "So will the Faculty," and with this covert hint the peacemakers turned the corner.

The sun shown brightly on the red-brown earth of the diamond when the Freshmen, the Sophomores and the Faculty met, according to agreement. The enterprising student-body management had chalked the Quad in conspicuous places:

RUSH of the YEAR, Sophomore-Freshman Game. Don't Miss It!

and the college responded. The co-eds were there, radiant in the snowiest of duck shirts, the gayest of shirt-waists. With them were "ladies' men," in variegated golf-stockings and gorgeous hat-bands. The Freshmen, gathered near first base, contrasted disreputably with this display; they wore old clothes, ragged hats, and they carried a miscellaneous collection of canes, borrowed from Juniors or stolen from Sophomores.

These stalwarts of the latest class were loaded with horns and noise-machines. Defiance exhaled from them. It was an impressive object-lesson on the evils of Freshman victories.

A few sensible Juniors went over and tried to quell their disturbance, but the infants were beyond any control of their class fathers; they had at their head the redoubtable Pete Halleck, with his perverted sense of the proprieties, and their uproar moderated not a bit. The Juniors returned to the bleachers, shaking their heads in disgust. Professor Grind, of the Committee on Student Affairs, was observed to write in his note-book. The Sophomores who saw this rejoiced that they were not in rushing clothes. Still the racket went on.

Jack Smith, in spotless tennis flannels, sat on the bleachers. Some girls from San Francisco, and one in particular as far as Cap was concerned, had come down with Tom Ashley's mother that morning, and he brought them over to the game. Pete Halleck picked him out at once and reminded the others of their promise.

Hannah Grant Daly, who did not know him to speak to, also picked him out. To her he looked more goodly than ever this afternoon, contrasted with the uncouthness of Halleck and others of her class. She watched him covertly, laughing and talking with the town girl beside him. He had laughed and talked very much like that to her, once, but he had forgotten it. That was natural; she had forgiven it long ago. Lillian Arnold, in the brightest of Easter hats, watched him, too.

The game was not exciting. The Freshmen were badly outplayed; the Sophomores galloped around the bases, and the babies' insolence grew with their opponents' score. As the last inning dragged its tedious length, the prospect of the Freshmen forcing a rush had become the important thing with the crowd. The fighting class limbered up for action. Now their third man struck out and the catcher's mask was off.

"Ready!" Pete Halleck's voice came out of the silence of the waiting crowd.

"All set!" and the class was up and off on a trot toward the Sophomore players, who were trying not to walk away any faster than was usual. One after another the baseball men were overtaken and went down in clouds of dust and hard language.

Yet the Sophomores would not rush. Frank Lyman had exhorted them simply, while the Freshmen were attacking their nine. One or two of the hot-heads hurried to the Hall for old clothes, but the majority stood looking on, angry but quiet.

"Now for Smith!" yelled Halleck. His men turned toward the co-ed section of the bleachers.

"Shall we get out of this?" Cap asked Ashley.

"Get out nothing! Stay right here with the girls. They wouldn't have the gall."

But the lust of fight was in the Freshman heart as the dust of fight was on the Freshman skin. They lined up, a ragged mass of impertinence, as near the women as they dared, and waited for the leader of the opposition. He chatted on, explaining the college rush to the girl with him, and gave no sign of moving.

"Shall we go in and take him?" asked an excited youngster.

"I'll give him a chance to come easy," said Halleck. He squared himself, adjusted his dusty hat, and went straight up the steps.

"Excuse me, Mr. Smith," said he, "you are forgetting an engagement you made with some of your friends yesterday."

This was the freshest thing in the history of the college. The Sophomore's fingers twitched.

"I think you can wait until later, Halleck," he said slowly. Then he turned to the girl.

From the time Halleck climbed the bleachers and went toward Smith and his guests, the spectators were stiff with astonishment; nobody did anything. They saw Halleck look for one moment into Smith's angry blue eyes, go down the steps, and bring back two big fellows. Before the Sophomore could move away from the girls, the three men had dragged him down the bleachers; one heave of Halleck's broad back and Smith was under them, with his wind gone, and a Freshman was getting a rope ready.

Then just as Ashley tore down the steps in a rage, a slip of a girl darted past him and put her hands on Halleck's shoulders; a small, sandy-haired girl with blazing eyes.

"Untie him, you great brutes!"

The man with the rope stared at her irresolutely, furtively slipping the knot tighter. By this time, Halleck was on his feet again and had recovered from his surprise.

"Excuse me," he began.

The girl looked him in the eye.

"Get that rope off!"

She was just a little thing, but her gaze never wavered. The direct gaze is something that wild beasts and bullies, Freshmen or otherwise, cannot bear. Pete Halleck looked around for moral support, but his men were shame-faced and the bleachers were silent. He bent down and slipped the rope off Smith's feet.

With the rout of their leader the whole fighting class, weighing some ten tons in battle trim, vanished like chaff before the spirit of one Freshie co-ed. By twos and threes they slouched away, trying to look unconcerned.

She turned to the man she had rescued.

"Are you much hurt, Mr. Smith?" she asked, her voice sweet with sympathy.

The Sophomore president stood there, rumpled, winded, flaming with embarrassment. Away up on the bleachers a girl in an Easter hat tittered and a general laugh followed. That laugh brought Smith to himself, but, before he could turn to thank her, Hannah, with a swift, frightened glance at the people, had fled to the Quadrangle. With swelling bosom and eyes stinging with restrained tears she leaned her face against a cool pillar and watched the swallows circle mistily about the red tiling.

People, coming from the ball-ground, passed her, unnoticed in the shadow. A man's voice, ringing with merriment, cried:

"Poor old Captain! I never saw him have such a chap. It's pretty hard on a man to have a girl do the Pocahontas act like that!"

A peal of Roble laughter answered.

"Pocahontas! O—oh, that's a cute name for her!"



HIS UNCLE'S WILL.



His Uncle's Will.

"It's a wise child that resembles its richest relative."

MODERN PROVERB.

Walter Olcott Haviland came to Stanford in September at the age of eighteen, and was rushed by the fraternities.

There is nothing remarkable about this, unless considered from Haviland's point of view. With his High School pin illuminating the vest on which a mystic Greek symbol was ere long to shine, he passed down the line of inquisitive Sophomores in Encina lobby, and into the Den of the Bear, presented his receipt for the room he had prudently engaged months ahead, and was duly bestowed within those plain white walls between which the Freshman begins a charmed existence of four years or four months, as the Committee may determine.

It is recorded that once before Commencement two Seniors came from fraternity houses at opposite ends of the campus and slept together the last night, as they had slept their first, in their Freshman room at the Hall. They had been rivals and in warring factions, but they lay down together in that place of beginnings, before a new heaven opened for them over a new earth. This is proof positive that you never forget your first room in the Hall. You may give it up for an attic in a chapter-house, you may go to live with young Freshleigh, with whom you are already chums, and whose apartment has the morning sun; but the first room is a foundation stone in your house of memories. Your trunk is brought in by the Student Transfer man (first lesson in self-help) and put down near the dreary-looking beds with their mattresses doubled on the foot-rail. Then, sitting down by the bare, shining table where, later on, theses are to be written and punches brewed, you stake out claims for the decorative material in your trunk. Certainly decorations are needed. The wardrobe stands forbiddingly against the wall. You will soon learn how to move it forward, reverse it, and adorn the back. The chilling whiteness of the walls is relieved only by one square, uncompromising mirror. An "Addersonian" tenderness has placed a yellow-flowered rug beside each bed. Otherwise, the place is barren.

If there is time before dinner, you swallow your loneliness and get out the home photographs and stand them up here and there, and the room is changed. These walls may become a scrap-book of four years' association with Alma Mater; the wardrobe may be hidden with kodaks of the gang and its exploits; but to-day, before you have even met the gang, you come into your own.

The newly-arrived Haviland, in the throes of this emotion, looks about him. He has put upon the ugly commode sundry pictures of his graduating class at the High School, each one dressed in his best, each flanked by floral offerings, each holding the impressive diploma. Later, these portraits will be less prominent in this college room.

He looks at them with a feeling of pity. It must be hard not to come to college. He is a lucky boy. Sliding unobtrusively into the hall-way, he strikes up an acquaintance with some other social Freshman, and together they watch the upper class-men coming in. Man after man drifts into the arms of waiting friends. How well they all know one another! Gradually he learns who and what these men are, the Seniors who manage the Hall or edit the College papers, the 'Varsity idols, the men who make College life. Important beings they seem to the Freshman, men who have reached heights above his modest possibilities, heroes who are great in the land. After dinner he mingles in the stag dances on the second floor hall-way; finding that a fellow class-man has neglected the graceful art, he takes him up on the third floor and teaches him the step. He is fitting in, you see. Then he hears the crowd surging into the lobby and picks up the chorus of "We'll rush the ball along," and before this first day is over he catches the contagion of that intangible, pervasive, never wholly fading thing, College spirit.

Jimmy Mason, Sophomore, hustling Student-Body assessments, drops in on him, and stops to chat awhile. Haviland learns that our team this year has lost such and such valuable men; that there are opportunities for a chap with football in him. The Freshman thinks of the day when the crowd at home cheered him as his school beat the Academy. He hands Mason the assessment money, being beautifully green yet. Like oases are these Freshmen to the Student-Body collector. Very likely the Sophomore rewards him by coming to his door, after the lights are out, at the head of a motley mob. They put him on the table, shivering in his nightie, and make derogatory remarks about his shape and his personal charms; then, having solemnly baptised him "Callipers," or whatever metaphorical name his physical architecture may suggest, they make him cavort for their delectation. If he shows modesty and courage in his unhappy obedience, he is greeted as a nice little boy and is introduced to his tormentors, who explain that the ritual was offered from the kindest motives. Doubtless it is this knowledge that makes him enjoy so keenly the sacrifice of fellow class-men, at which he is permitted to be present the next evening.

When he is spoken to mysteriously one night by "Pellams" Chase, a Junior from the Row, and told to put on his oldest clothes and to get his trunk-rope ("to rope up a Sophomore's trunk this time," hints the Junior), for the first time he sees his class as a whole, and stands shoulder to shoulder with them in the first College rush. The subsequent pullings and haulings, the poundings and jammings of this experience are happily compensated for if Chase takes him when all is over, binds up his bruises and tells him about fights of other days when there were giants upon the campus. After this, the College is never the immense, far-away thing it has seemed. He has seen his own class-men together, he has measured his strength with the dread Sophs, he is a University man.

Long before this the fraternities have spotted him.

* * * * *

"What are you going to do next hour?"

Haviland had just come out from his nine-thirty recitation and found "Cap" Smith waiting for him. Smith was a Beta Rho, and he had waited there in the same way for the same Freshman more than once in the month since the opening. It was Pellams who had discovered the boy, one night in Mason's room, where the Junior loafed half his time. Pellams had a big heart surely, for he had at once interested himself in Haviland, asking him over to dinner to meet the fellows. The Freshman knew it was the Juniors' duty to look after the infant class. This particular Junior was a College favorite,—Walt had seen that—and the boy from far-away New England went across the campus to the Row feeling that he was getting into good hands. The Rho house seemed about right. Dinner was a boisterous affair where the men took hands around the table and sang a rollicking accompaniment to Pellams' coon songs, strange table-manners that did not appear much to disturb Perkins' mother, who poured coffee at the end. Afterward they all sat out on the porch steps in the summer evening with their pipes, watching three of the men play catch. One of the fellows danced a shuffle while the rest stood around and clapped time and shouted, "Come on you Nigger!" They were very happy; it was a bully way to live; the homelike look of things appealed to the Freshman. Two of the fellows walked back to the Hall with him, and when they said good-night they shook his hand strongly and hoped they would see more of him.

This was the beginning. The college had become aware of his presence now. So far he had taken just nine meals that he had paid for, and had been away from the Hall one night out of four.

At the reception to the Freshmen he had been introduced to the same Faculty people six times over by members of as many fraternities, each presenting him as an individual entirely under their auspices and for whom they alone were responsible. Higgins, the sky-scraping Beta Phi, whom he had met only that evening, took him arm in arm up to the President's wife, and said:

"I want to introduce Mr. Haviland, a particular friend of mine. You will be good to him for my sake, won't you?" And the lady with a twinkle in her brown eyes, having recently promised to do the same for Jack Smith's sake, pledged her favors anew to the bewildered Walt.

Haviland did not quite understand this attitude of open arms. His first days in the Hall had not prepared him for it. He did not know that because he was well-bred, well-dressed and athletically promising, he was generally voted the prize Freshman of the year.

Then came the bids. There were only a few of the crowds that did not spike him; three who were manifestly not of his style and two who never presumed to enter the game until the others had made their winnings. All sorts of methods had been used. The first bid came early; he was given twenty-four hours to answer it, as "the Gamma Chi Tau never wait for a man." The Freshman, however, getting riper in the sun of experience, interpreted this to mean fear of competition, and so "declined with assurances of continued friendship." There was a crowd who slapped him on the back and called him "old man." Once he had been fresh enough to tell them a story, and they had laughed so uproariously over it that he was dreadfully embarrassed. The hospitality of another set seemed to consist of a sly but systematic attempt to get him drunk for some mysterious purpose of their own. He had put some of them to bed and felt superior, which was fatal to their chances.

He had been to many varieties of dinner-tables. Some of them were homelike; the talk at others had robbed him of appetite.

"What do you think of our crowd?" asked Roach, keenly, after a particularly disagreeable meal at which there had been much coarseness and a wreck of a tablecloth.

"They seem to me to be about the most congenial fellows I ever met," answered the disgusted but tactful Haviland, and Roach, going back to his house, announced authoritatively that the boy was theirs if they wanted him.

By this time he had learned the art of dodging invitations and remaining non-committal when asked, "Well, Walt, are you going to do the right thing?" Many a set, piled upon the beds in a fraternity room, sat up late talking him over and wondering how he was "coming on."

The Beta Phis, for instance, were in painful doubt. They were conscious of a comparatively poor stack-up, but their rushing energy was admirable, and once the persecuted Haviland had been obliged to ask a Beta Rho to hide him from them. Pellams and Smith were merry at dinner that night.

In his heart, Walt had about decided on Beta Rho. This crowd treated him with well-bred cordiality but with far less effusiveness than the others. He was pleased when they had let him mix with them without permitting him to forget the gulf between. This had put him off his guard so that he had grown accustomed to them. Observing him expertly from the corners of their eyes, they affected not to notice the way he blushed after having joined unconsciously in a Beta Rho song. One day he dropped over uninvited, and they understood. But in the first week of their acquaintance they had told him to hold off and be slow about pledging himself, and nothing more had been said so far.

On the night of the first rush, ending in complete victory for the Freshmen, Haviland had been so unfortunate as to clinch with Cap Smith, and he was largely responsible for the ignominious tying up of that husky Sophomore. He would much rather have been carted off himself, if it hadn't been for the class. He saw his Beta Rho chances vanishing. Pellams evidently did not know what had happened, he was so good to him after it, rubbing his bruises and dressing his scraped cheek. The next day Cap Smith came over and bid him to the fraternity. As a matter of principle, Haviland asked for a week to decide.

This indulgence was up to-day and now Cap was waiting for him after the second-hour class. Walt knew what answer he should give. He felt very contented.

"I got your mail for you," said Smith, handing him an envelope. "I've a letter of my own to read, so tackle yours while we walk along."

They went up toward the stock-farm, and the boy opened his mother's letter and read eagerly the home news and the affectionate questions. She enclosed, she said, the check which his uncle, who was putting him through College, had sent for October. Following this were a few words that made him stare hard at the road before him, as he and Smith strolled on. "Your uncle writes," said the letter, "that when he was at Amherst he was a fraternity man, and thinks you ought to be one, and he would like to have you join the society to which he belonged, the Beta Phi. I am sure, Wo dear, you will follow his wishes in a matter like this. It is not much to do in return."

Poor Walt! The Beta Rhos had never seemed such smooth fellows as at this moment when he felt himself suddenly pledged to the Beta Phis. In his mind's eye the Phis passed before him, one by one, particularly a certain long, unprepossessing member who had stayed till after twelve one night and bored him with a dreary recital of the prominence of his house in College politics, of the stump speeches that a former brother, now a historical personage, had made in Mayfield for prohibition, to say nothing of the essay prizes in philology that another ancient Phi had won in the dim past, when the chapter must have been more prominent than at present. In comparison with this record, the Rhos were numbskulls, dwelling in an amplified smoking-room, Walt must admit; their control of the Eleven and of the Glee Club was nothing. And now his future was black with philology prizes, with meals at which stew was a staple, and where only visitors had clean napkins.

The two fellows had by this time reached the trotting stables. They looked in at the beautiful, sleek racers, carefully blanketed and booted, and stroked an inquisitive nose or two, reached out over the white doors. Then they went on up the stock-farm yard and along the road to the bridge over San Francisquito. Here Smith stopped; leaning on the rail, he looked down at his blonde image in the shallow water below.

"Well, Professor, what's your answer? You ought to know your mind by this time, surely, and we want you bad, my boy."

"Cap, old man," began the Freshman, his voice a little husky, for he was sorely troubled, "you must know how I appreciate the way you fellows have treated me, and that I want you particularly for a friend." He stopped, but Smith kept silent. The fraternity had had refusals before; they usually began this way.

"I don't know just what I ought to say," went on the luckless Walt. "I really did think you were the crowd I should join, but something has come up and I can't say yes."

"What is it? Is it because you think we don't study enough? We do, though, a great deal more than it looks. This has been rushing season and we had to do the entertaining stunt a lot, and Pellams would give any crowd the look of bumming. We really do work hard the rest of the year."

"Oh, no," said Walt, "it isn't anything like that, Cap."

"There's somebody in the gang that you don't like, then; somebody that you don't know well and don't understand. Isn't that so? Who is it? You ought to tell me."

"I would, Cap, if that were the reason, but it isn't. I like every man of them all."

"What is it then?"

"Nothing that I can tell you." Poor Walt, he was ashamed of his uncle; Lyman at the Hall had told him that the whole Beta Phi fraternity was as scrubby as their Stanford chapter.

Cap's eyes had an angry gleam. "Somebody has been throwing mud," he said, kicking up a splinter from the bridge floor. "There are plenty of them to do it."

"It isn't that at all. I wouldn't be influenced that way," protested Haviland. "It's another matter."

"Well, I suppose this is final," said Smith, struggling hard with his disappointment. The Freshman's past attitude had paved the way for a different answer.

"Let's not say that," Walt began slowly. "Give me a while longer, Cap; things may change. I had hoped—" He broke off;—he could never tell Smith—he had not until that very moment told himself—how much he had looked forward to being a Rho.

"Things may change," he said again as Smith turned savagely and started back. He was trying to compromise, but he had no idea how any change was to come about. He brooded over it in his room that night, and the more he pondered the more clearly he realized that the debt to his uncle stood in his way. Plainly, he was up against it. He made the foot of his iron bedstead jingle with a petulant kick, and, muttering the Phi yell in a savage tone, went off to sleep.

At luncheon the next day at the Phi house, the Freshman was so friendly and so gracious that two of the Chapter went out into the kitchen and shook hands. Had he not inquired solicitously about the fraternity's position in Amherst, had he not expressed great pleasure at learning of their high political standing back there? Never a word had they heard of his uncle, however. The Freshman who is in his own neighborhood does not donate additional arguments.

The Phi house was shaken to its foundations. This was the greatest piece of work for years. Walt was immediately invited to stay for dinner and to spend the night and the next day, but although it was Saturday, he declined. Even the tempting bait of a Populist campaign rally moved him not.

The days passed and Walter Olcott Haviland was an unhappy child. His sudden intimacy with the Phis could not escape the astonished Rhos; he was sensitive to the change in their manner, slight as it was. He would have been glad enough to have stayed out of fraternities altogether if it would have helped matters. There was a very jolly set in the Hall, men who had refused far better bids than the Phis. Jimmie Mason and Frank Lyman, "Peg" Langdon and Blake, the fullback; these fellows, as prominent as any in College, were in the dormitory crowd; they used one another's rooms and tobacco and clothes with the utmost good nature. Walt had been fond of the big building from his first day there; he could have had a happy time with this independent set.

He was not made any happier by Lyman's saying, "Whatever you do, don't join the Phis. They've no standing here, and you won't help yourself any." Freshmen usually listened to what Lyman said. But Haviland had thought and reasoned and struggled with himself, and had come to a conclusion. To write to his uncle, "I have joined the Phis because you are one," would be worth any sacrifice. Perhaps he could work to improve the crowd a little after he was one of them. At least there was no reason why they need be his only friends.

He went to the lab one afternoon with his decision made. If the Phis asked him to dinner, he would go and put his head on the block.

As he came along toward the main entrance he saw Andrew Higgins, the longest, lankiest Phi of them all, bearing down upon him. His heart sank, but his resolution was firm, and he looked his fate in the face. When his executioner had almost reached him, somebody touched his shoulder; it was Smith.

"Before your frat brother gets hold of you," muttered Cap, drawing Walt aside, "I want to speak to you. The boys must have your final answer to-day."

The "frat brother" was not to be turned down. He loomed up steadily in their direction. Walt was miserable. It was the beginning of the end.

"I'll give it to-night," he said hurriedly, as the Phi reached them.

"Will you come to dinner?"

Haviland wanted one sunbeam before the darkness.

"Yes, I'll come, Cap," and turned to shake hands with the Phi, whose invitation was frozen half-way in his throat. Now the Beta Phis were not of the people who let to-morrow get anything while to-day lasts, so Higgins asked Walt to come down after dinner for the night, and the unhappy boy, half-hearing, promised.

It was a gloomy dinner for the Freshman, baked funeral meats and he the corpse. Mrs. Perkins gave him a motherly smile and told him in a careful undertone that she was glad he was going to be one of her boys, after which he felt childishly close to tears. He sat out-doors with the others and smoked and joined weakly in the singing. The roses clinging to the porch had never been so sweet; the Rho dog had never nosed so affectionately against his shoulder. There was to be no substitute for this. He wished he had never seen the campus. His mood communicated itself to the others and things grew slow. One by one the fellows slipped away with various excuses. Finally Cap said:

"Come up to the room," and Haviland went up stairs with the emotions one carries to the dentist.

Smith threw himself on the bed and motioned Walt to a chair at his study table. They tried a little general conversation, but failed mournfully. The Freshman had a wretched feeling that this room was home to him. He had slept here so often and he knew every athletic picture and trophy around it. There had been something said about his living here with Cap after Christmas. The clock ticked spitefully at him.

Smith's voice, deep and quiet, broke the pause.

"What's the good word, Professor?"

Walt swallowed a lump, nervously opened a book that lay on the table, then looked at the big red sweater on the bed, and said:

"I can't do it, Cap."

Smith kicked a pillow of which he thought a great deal almost into the grate, and said with fine scorn:

"When do you join the Phis?"

"I don't know," said Van, drearily.

"Well, I think you're nutty; it's the cheesiest gang in College."

The battle had begun. Walt might as well practice his defense at once, so he said with a little dignity:

"My uncle is a Phi, and it is his wish."

"So that is it!" Such a reason was no discredit to the Rhos; therefore it was the harder to accept. "You give me a jolt, Walt. Just because your uncle is in a rotten fraternity you must crawl into the heap, too. I'd see him hanged first before I'd queer myself with those yaps."

Cap went on even more impatiently, but the Freshman heard not a word. He was staring at the book open before him.

"Cap, what book is this?"

"The fraternity catalogue."

"What fraternity?"

"Ours, of course; whose did you think it was, the—"

Walt gave a hysterical whoop and flung himself over the footboard upon the astonished Smith. He rolled him over the bed and sent him to join the pillow on the floor; then, sitting up on the bed with tousled hair and shining eyes, he said:

"Cap, if you still want me, I say yes!"

"What's the matter with you?" asked the amazed Sophomore from the rug.

"Nothing!" shouted Walt. "I see the whole thing; uncle's awful writing—mother got it Phi instead of Rho—she doesn't know one from the other—his name's in your book. Hoo!" and he sprang on Smith again and lifted him bodily.

The Chapter had been waiting. Hearing propitious sounds, they came stringing in, and Haviland's explanation, with the celebration that followed it, took such a length of time that the longest, lankiest Phi fell asleep in the parlor and his lamp burned out about two.



THE INITIATION OF DROMIO.



The Initiation of Dromio.

"I know a prof.,—not much to see,— Take care! Mistakes are made here frequently, Beware!"

The Rho fraternity called Walter Haviland "professor." Haviland was one of their pledged Freshmen. In rushing, a good nickname, gracefully used, is a great thing. It puts a Freshman considerably at his ease, and impresses him with the feeling that he belongs to the set.

The first day that Haviland came over to dinner, Bob Duncan, a Senior, spoke up from his end of the table: "Are you a relative of Lamb, the botany professor?"

"I have never heard that I am," answered the Freshman.

"Are you in any of his classes?"

"No; I'm not going to take botany."

"If you were, I don't believe the class could tell you apart. Doesn't he look like Lamb to beat the band, fellows?"

"He's a little heavier than the prof.," suggested Smith.

"Oh, perhaps he is a little," admitted Duncan, "but their height is the same to an inch, and the facial resemblance is great."

"He can't look much like a professor," laughed the Freshman.

"He doesn't," said Duncan, "they've got him down in the register as an associate professor in botany, but that's all he has to his credit. He gets taken for a Freshman right along. New students ask him if he is registered and what his major is—sure they do."

"They say there was a big farmer who went in to register in botany and wouldn't do business with poor Lamb at all," said Perkins. "He said he wasn't so green as he looked, and he knew all about these students who make believe they're professors and give fake examinations. The professor was as red as a beet."

"I don't blame him," said Duncan. "Why, the man is married and has two children."

"Are you sure they're his," said Pellams, seriously. "I've seen them with him on the Quad, but I thought perhaps he'd borrowed them for effect, to keep off the Senior girls."

"The year he came here the Beta Phis tried to rush him, didn't they?" asked Smith. Duncan scowled across the table at the Sophomore. This was Haviland's first day at the house; they could josh other frats later, if he came their way; just now it was a break.

Ted Perkins interrupted tactfully. "Have some of this Spanish goo? The English department here is crazy on theatricals. They will probably want you for a grand revival of the Comedy of Errors."

"If I were you," came in Smith, to cover up his slip, "I would go over and draw his salary some day. They would pay it all right if they didn't look twice and ask questions."

"Better look out," added Pellams, in his solemn drawl, "those babies of his will be claiming you in the Quad in front of all Roble some sunny day, and then you might just as well leave college!"

This table-talk gave the men an idea for a nickname, and so, when they knew the Freshman a little better, they slipped an arm through his and called him "Professor." It was really the most civilized nickname in the house.

One Thursday, at football practice, about two weeks after Haviland had agreed to join, Pellams spoke to him.

"Professor, on Saturday night you are to be initiated. Bring over your suit-case with a change of under-clothes and a pair of old shoes."

"I was going up to San Francisco on Saturday," murmured Haviland, his heart beating a bit faster, "but——"

"You have changed your mind," finished Pellams, quietly. "We will have dinner as usual, and you will be on time, please. So long, Professor."

Haviland was not wholly at peace as he walked back to the dormitory. A Freshman never becomes especially hilarious in anticipating his initiation night; there is an uncertain certainty about it that he cannot entirely laugh away, however much natural bravery he may have, however hoary he may be in high school fraternity experience. At the chapter house, where things have been made so pleasant, careless remarks are dropped, full of sinister meaning. It is not nearly so comfortable there now, and Freshman Damocles wishes the suspense were over.

When the fateful Saturday dawned, Walter had a strong impulse to go to the city as he had originally planned. Pellams had explained to him that his having held out so long before agreeing to join would probably mean his "getting it unusually hard." He knew that of all the fraternities, the Rhos were the most severe in their initiations—one of the Rhos had told him so.

At the post-office that morning he met Professor Lamb starting for a day's botanizing in the foothills. He did not know the instructor, but he envied him as he leaned on his wheel and watched the botany man take the fence and start off across the brown pastures toward the hills beyond the lake. There certainly was a strong resemblance.

"Oh," groaned the candidate for fraternity privileges, "I wish it was a case of his resembling me instead of my looking like him. I only wish I was the prof, now, I'd change places quickly enough. I'm afraid I'm a coward."

He wondered if they guessed how scared he was; he hoped not. He pedaled around to the courts, where Cap. Smith was waiting to play tennis, and he put on an infant bravado which secretly pleased the Sophomore. After a few sets Cap. put his racket under his arm.

"No more tennis, Professor," he said, with meaning; "you'd better rest most of the day. Get out your work for Monday, you won't feel much like studying to-morrow, you know, and don't forget to be at the house at six sharp." Then, since the Freshman had visibly wilted, Smith grinned all the way across the field.

Haviland suspected two other fellows in the Hall of being in a state of mind similar to his own, but as he had been instructed to keep the matter absolutely secret, he could not turn to them for relief. He worried through the long Saturday, making futile attacks on the work prescribed for Monday, strumming in an aimless way on his banjo, and finally writing his mother a letter between the lines of which she at once read malaria.

Dinner at the Rho house was the most miserable meal he had ever choked his way through. A half-dozen graduates were present, and some men from the Berkeley chapter. These visitors seemed a solemn lot, and conversation included the candidates only now and then. During the lulls in the talk, the Freshmen made audible sounds trying to swallow their food; this was so embarrassing that they gave up the effort to eat, only gulping water now and then during talk. It was a relief when some one touched each Freshman quietly, and the condemned youngsters followed upstairs, their faces wearing pitiful dumb-victim-at-the-altar expressions, or trying with ghastly smiles to show how little they cared.

The young moon, sloping toward the shaggy rim of the Palo Alto hills soon after eight o'clock, looked down into the pasture lands back of the campus. There she saw Walter Haviland, blindfolded and with a rope about his waist. Three other Freshmen were in a similar condition in different parts of the field. Haviland had been intrusted to the tender mercy of Cap. Smith, a 'Varsity man, and Pellams Chase, greatest of all joshers. This was indeed a high honor. Two of the less distinguished members hovered about them, eager to add their services. Their objective point was a fence skirted by a gully through which water ran in the winter time; into this gully they flung the luckless Walt and left him there while they took their ruthless course to a part of the field where another group of men had gathered.

The moon touched delicately the redwood trees upon the western ridge, then slipped down beyond them. With her last look into the field she saw Haviland lying on his face at the bottom of the gulch. She saw also Professor Lamb, of the botany department, hurrying home cross-country from the day's collecting on upper San Francisquito Creek, tired, dusty, bedraggled, thinking with an unscientific enthusiasm of the hot dinner awaiting his homecoming. The lingering moon, peering over the mountain edge, saw the instructor clear the fence and plunge into the shadowy gulch. Then, before she could see what happened next, the stern law of the solar system drew her reluctant down.

The four men who had charge of Haviland came back from their consultation with the others. When they were near the place where they had left their victim, a man appeared, climbing out. This called for investigation; they bounded along through the gulch and came up with the fellow. To their surprise it was Haviland with his bandage off and the rope nowhere. It was the first time a man had ever tried to give them the slip. He should pay for it! Cap. Smith threw himself on the Freshman at the first glimpse of his face. In a jiffy there was a new bandage over his eyes and another rope coiled around his waist; this time it included his hands. He struggled resolutely, but in silence, for his breath had left him when he struck the ground with Smith on top.

They seized him firmly and ran him at breakneck speed over a terrible course, heading for an old well which waters a back pasture. Here they stopped, spent with running.

"On your knees, Professor!" gasped Pellams, with as much authority as his lack of breath would allow.

The panting victim remained standing.

"Down!" accompanied by a resounding blow of a barrel stave.

Still no movement, but a gurgle was heard as though speech was being labored for.

Biff!

The unfortunate creature sprawled beside the well, but struggled up again to a half-kneeling posture.

"This—must—stop!" he gasped, painfully. "It—is—an—outrage. I—am——"

"No levity, sir!" said Smith. "You've got to do what we say, Professor, or you won't get in at all."

"I don't—want—to—get—in," panted the poor wretch in desperate protest. "It's—a—mistake—I——"

"See here, Professor; where's your nerve? Be a man! You'll never make a Rho at this rate. Brace up, for Heaven's sake! Rise, Neophyte."

They gave the rope a cruel wrench, which brought their captive to his feet.

"Let's kill him," whispered one of the men. Never before had there been so shameful a display of the white feather.

"We'll duck him."

They brought their Freshman to the brink of the well. They tightened the rope under his arms, and, before he could divine their intentions, they were lowering him down the slippery side. When his feet struck the cold water he struggled violently, shouting something which his splashing and the echo of the well made unintelligible. Presently they hoisted him, dripping and speechless with rage.

"Thou hast now been cleansed of thy sin and cowardice, O Neophyte," declaimed Pellams. "Forward to the joys that await thee!"

They dragged him home on the run, taking the road this time and making all haste to the house. The half-dead initiate had to be carried upstairs. Smith took off the rope and told him to strip for a bath. The victim sat on the edge of the Sophomore's bed and shook his head feebly. He was evidently exhausted.