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+Project Gutenberg's Stanford Stories, by Charles K. Field and Will H. Irwin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stanford Stories
+       Tales of a Young University
+
+Author: Charles K. Field
+        Will H. Irwin
+
+Release Date: March 2, 2008 [EBook #24735]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STANFORD STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 blasé 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 café 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 phaëton.
+
+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. Señorita Dolores, in the rôle 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 Señora 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.
+
+"Come, hurry up, Haviland," said Cap. He felt a brutal impatience to see
+what the barrel staves had done to the fellow's back. "Get bathed and
+put on your dry clothes and be ready for the feed."
+
+The initiate raised his hands slowly and untied the bandage. He blinked
+a moment at Smith, then he said huskily, "I am not Haviland, Mr. Smith,
+nor do I want any 'feed.' I want to know what this means." There was no
+anger in his voice, only great weariness.
+
+The freezing truth dawned on the horrified student. His first impulse
+was to rush out of the house and to keep running. He managed to stammer:
+
+"Where's Haviland?"
+
+"I don't know where Haviland is," muttered the tired instructor. "I
+don't know who Haviland is. If I have taken his place I am ready to
+change again." He looked down upon his clothes, stuccoed with tarweed
+burrs and wet mud.
+
+Then Jack Smith laughed aloud.
+
+"Professor, when we've found Haviland, and you've seen him, you'll
+understand the whole horrible mistake, and----"
+
+"There was no mistake," said the other, coldly, "you called me Professor
+while you were beating me."
+
+This only set Smith off again.
+
+"That's our name for Haviland. You see he looks like you--oh, I can't
+explain it to you, Professor; but when you've seen the man you'll
+forgive us, I know you will. And you've simply got to stay to our feed
+now, if we have to tie you up again to keep you here."
+
+Professor Lamb, of the botany department, smiled wanly.
+
+"I think I will take a bath, anyway," he sighed.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBSTITUTED FULLBACK.
+
+
+
+
+The Substituted Fullback.
+
+
+    "Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain!
+       I know not, faith, not I;
+     Is it more strange the dead should walk again
+       Than that the quick should die?"
+                                        ALDRICH.
+
+
+    "Frank Lyman, Football Manager, Stanford University:
+
+    "Blake died three forty-five. Body going East. I return five
+    train.        DIEMANN."
+
+When he had sent this message to the University, the instructor in
+Psychology went gloomily down to the Third and Townsend Street station.
+
+There was nothing more to be done just then. He had telegraphed to the
+dead athlete's parents; the undertakers had their instructions about
+shipping the body to Ohio, and the hospital bills would be arranged for
+later. He slipped into a single seat at the back of the car to avoid the
+chance of a travelling acquaintance. Now that the business part of it
+was over, he could not talk to anyone.
+
+The whole thing had been so sudden that it was hard to feel the truth.
+Barely a week ago he had stood on the practice field at the University,
+following Blake's splendid play and listening to the shouting of the
+crowded bleachers, who idolized their great fullback with the absolute
+idolatry of a college crowd. It was not easy to believe that all this
+physical manhood, all this intellectual promise, had been snuffed out
+like a candle before their very eyes.
+
+Diemann pressed his face against the car window and stared out at the
+terraced produce gardens slipping dimly by in the early November dusk.
+Between him and the dead fullback there had been such companionship as
+comes now and then to an instructor under thirty and a man nearing the
+end of his college course. When Diemann, just home from Germany, came
+West to teach Psychology, he found young Blake the college hero. The new
+instructor had himself been a noted back; he still hovered somewhere
+between enthusiast and fiend. At Stanford he at once identified himself
+with the football men, and they welcomed him gladly as assistant coach.
+During that first season, two years ago, he had come to know and like
+Fred Blake. Later, the fullback took Diemann's course in Psychology, and
+to the elder man's gratification, developed a passion for the subject.
+The instructor recognized the quality of the athlete's mind, and before
+long the two were working together, reading and discussing along the
+line of the teacher's special interest.
+
+Coming home from the sober materialism of Leipzig, Diemann had realized
+more fully than ever how thoroughly the interest in matters occult had
+pervaded the mind of his native country. To this department of
+Psychology he turned with an admitted interest in things unseen and a
+confidence in the restraint of his University training. He felt that he
+stood barely upon the threshold of the subject, held back by material
+prejudice and the conservatism of little faith; yet his enthusiasm grew
+daily. He weighed the evidence of phenomena with an impartiality that
+other people pronounced belief. The attitude of those about him was for
+the most part unsympathetic. Some to whom he had made furtive
+confidences called him "spooky," a spiritualist; but he was merely an
+investigator, trying to be fair. It was an alluring study; perhaps he
+ran the risk of over-enthusiasm--he had known people who had
+spiritualized the palpably material--but he was guarding against this
+danger; it would take an exceptional impulse ever to get him to that
+point.
+
+It might be that some such temptation was coming to him now. He had just
+seen his friend pass into perfect knowledge. Blake had said something to
+him at the last that still ran in his ears, above the rumble of the
+train. "I will come back, if there is anything in it all."
+
+Diemann, peering out into the deepening gloom toward the bay shore
+faintly white in the luminous mist, thought over this last interview of
+theirs; he was finding it hard to realize that their friendship had
+ended.
+
+Only eight days before, he remembered, Blake first complained. It was at
+the practice, and Diemann had given him a shot about his listless work.
+Fred had answered:
+
+"I can't help it, Die; I feel dead, somehow. I'm afraid I'm going stale,
+after all."
+
+He recalled the drawn look on Fred's face. But the boy would come out
+the next night, for there was only a week before the team would leave
+for the Springs, and so much had to be done that the captain simply
+couldn't lay off. Toward the end of the practice, he collapsed. With his
+arm over Lyman's shoulder he had gone back to the Hall, dragging his
+feet heavily, while the crowd sat on the bleachers, quiet and
+frightened. Then the pain came, tearing its way into the heroic body,
+and the specialist hurriedly summoned from San Francisco had said that
+they must get him to the hospital.
+
+Now it was all over, and Diemann was following his melancholy telegram
+to college. He could guess the effect of the news. A week ago the
+knowledge of Blake's illness had staggered them; the college had grown
+sick at heart; the city papers published details and the hopes of
+Berkeley bounded to certainty of victory, for there was only one Blake.
+Without him the Stanford team was nothing exceptional, and common
+estimate gave the chance to California. The Stanford management did the
+only thing they could do by putting in Ashley, the scrub fullback; but
+this did not help matters materially. Ashley was a man of beautiful
+physique, and the most conscientious player on the field. There he
+stopped. He utterly lacked the head-work that Blake put into the game.
+
+For the star fullback had possessed the football instinct. Beyond his
+quickness and dash, he had the mysterious faculty of staying with the
+ball. If he were breaking the line, he placed the hole the fraction of
+an instant before anyone else perceived it. They used to put him at
+quarterback in defensive work, and he knew by inspiration where the play
+was going, so that the line felt confident with him at their backs.
+
+Tom Ashley had nothing of all this. He punted as well as the 'Varsity
+man, generally better, at the beginning of the season; but was slow with
+his kick, often fatally slow when the 'Varsity broke through the scrub
+line. He was late in starting, too, though a strong runner when out in
+the field. The chief beauty of his game was a quick and certain
+straight-arm. At another time he might have easily been the 'Varsity
+fullback, for he put up a hard, steady game from one end of the season
+to the other; but he had come to college with Blake, and the position
+had been out of the question. Besides, there were a couple of star
+halves; he was not good at end, either. So he staid on the Scrub eleven,
+and worked doggedly for three years.
+
+Diemann lay back in the car seat and aimlessly thought of his work with
+the substitute the week of Fred's illness. He had done his best with
+Ashley, trying to instill into him something of the other's style and
+dash. He had talked with him long and carefully, showing him the subtle
+points of Blake's game. During the few practices following the star's
+departure he had watched the new man faithfully through every play,
+giving him all his time. He was sorry for the sub. A man could be placed
+in no more exacting position.
+
+Ordinarily, such a chance would have been a god-send to a scrub player,
+for the second-eleven man is the type of the Great Unthanked. Diemann
+thought of the three months through which the scrub trains religiously,
+sacrificing beloved pipe, or sorority dance, or week's end trip to
+Mayfield, or to the Orpheum in town; leaving the "gang" singing in the
+moonlit Quad, while he turns in at ten according to pledge; faring day
+after day on the same service of rare beef and oatmeal water; getting
+pounded and battered about over a hard field every afternoon. Ashley had
+had three years of this sort of thing--and all for what? At best, to
+squat in football clothes on the side-lines, Thanksgiving day, with
+Blake's or Smith's sweater around his neck, waiting for the accident
+that may give the game to Berkeley at the same time that it lets him
+trot out on the field, while the crowd calls out to him encouragingly,
+although they are sick at heart. He goes through each season borne up by
+the excitement, working breast to breast with the honored 'Varsity, but
+lost in their mighty shadow. When the big day comes he slips back into
+the great, wild crowd that lifts the team to its shoulders; worship is
+not for him, no, nor remembrance either, in that hour of homage. Such
+men, to the bleachers, are but working material for the 'Varsity; the
+scrub player is part of an inorganic thing--until his chance comes.
+
+Yet, when fortune gave Ashley his chance he was not to be envied. To be
+put suddenly, at the last moment almost, into the shoes of the college
+hero, when the hopes of the University had been centered in that one
+man, this was too much for any fellow. In his docile way the substitute
+went into the trying place, working along as faithfully, and to all
+appearance with as little concern, as in his old position. Secretly, the
+responsibility wore upon him. It was a hopeless undertaking to be like
+Blake; but everybody expected it of him. He tried his best to grasp the
+patient coaching of Diemann and to put it in play at the right time, but
+he never seemed quick enough; that cursed slowness of his came in to
+show how futile it all was. Everything he did or could do as a football
+man was made negative by the fact that he was in Blake's place. It was a
+hard graft.
+
+Diemann had known all along what the fellow was suffering, and he pitied
+him. According to Ashley's room-mate, the boy talked in his sleep, all
+night sometimes, chiefly about Blake and the play. If they did not look
+sharp, the coach said to himself, there might be another stale man on
+their hands.
+
+Diemann had been thinking of this that very morning when he got the
+doctor's telegram. The shock had driven out every thought of Ashley and
+the team. All through his work with the sub it had not occurred to him
+that anything fatal could come to Blake, he had been doing so well;
+then, without warning, came the message saying that he was sinking. He
+had got there just in time. Now it was all over and he was going back
+to college, where Fred would never hear them shout for him again, never
+feel an arm about him in the long walks over the hills.
+
+When the train drew into Palo Alto, Frank Lyman, the football manager,
+quiet and sober-faced, stood under the station-light.
+
+"Can you come to dinner with me?" asked Diemann.
+
+The two rode along under the oaks to the instructor's Palo Alto
+boarding-house. When they were alone upstairs, the manager said:
+
+"Will you tell me about it? You got up there all right?"
+
+"Yes," said the other, slowly; "not any too soon. The boy was conscious
+at the last, and knew me and talked a bit. It was all football, pretty
+much. I don't think he was quite clear enough to talk about other
+things."
+
+"What did he say--that is, anything special?"
+
+"No; he said he was more than sorry that he wasn't going to get in the
+game; it was his last and he wanted to play, but, of course, it wasn't
+his fault, and the college wouldn't think he had thrown them down. He'd
+never been a quitter, he said."
+
+"No, never," said the manager.
+
+"He went on in that strain a good deal; said that he wished that he
+could have stayed longer, just to play for them again. At the end he
+pressed my hand and said: 'I'll come back somehow, Die, if there is
+anything in it.'"
+
+The Psychology instructor had spoken half in revery. He added quickly:
+"He was pretty well gone then, poor old chap, and wandering a little,
+and soon after that, why, he went over the line."
+
+He was sorry for having let that sentence slip out. The student would
+not understand it; he could not know what those last words of Blake's
+had meant to him, who saw their meaning. Lyman would only think it a bit
+of ghastly humor that need not have been repeated. But the manager did
+not take it so, evidently.
+
+"That reminds me of something, Diemann," he said. "I haven't talked it
+over with anyone yet, because everybody is sour-balled enough as it is.
+It's about Ashley. I'm afraid he is going stale."
+
+"Yes?" said Diemann, with dull interest, "I've rather been afraid of
+it."
+
+"Of course, I knew he was up on his toes about his job, but I didn't
+know just how bad it was until this afternoon. You see, you weren't
+here, and after practice there were things to speak about, so I walked
+over to the Hall with him. Then I thought I'd rub him myself, because
+Billy is overworked, you know. He didn't answer questions for a time,
+but lay quite still and looked at me, yet I don't think he saw me at
+all. He began to talk away, speaking of himself, in the third person,
+mind you, and about his poor play and all that. He was as clean nutty as
+any man you ever saw; as near as I could make out he thought he was
+Fred."
+
+Diemann faced the manager.
+
+"What time was this, Frank?"
+
+"About five, I think. Shortly afterward I got your telegram. He went on
+giving the straightest kind of football talk; but he was no more himself
+all the time than I am he. This went on for several minutes; then he got
+clear again. Pretty soon he rose and said he was faint, but guessed he
+was all right. I didn't know whether to speak to the doctor or not. Now,
+that sort of thing won't do; the man can't have such attacks and keep in
+shape. If he goes stale, where will we be?"
+
+"He talked like Blake, did he?"
+
+"Yes, really he did. He had even Fred's little way of sliding over his
+r's. Being troubled about having Fred's place has unstrung him. You've
+noticed his absent-mindedness out on the field? I know Ashley pretty
+well; he's always been sensitive as to what people think about him; he
+likes to feel that he's doing what you expect of him. He was struck on
+the head to-day; I don't doubt that's what made him a little off.
+Still, his nervous condition must be bad."
+
+Diemann rose and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
+
+"Yes," said he, thoughtfully, "we must watch him. Perhaps we ought to
+speak to Dr. Forest; but I'll look after him a while first."
+
+"Very well. We won't have any practice to-morrow, out of respect to
+Fred; we couldn't stand it, any of us; that will give Ashley a rest,
+then Friday we have the last practice before going to the Springs."
+
+"I am going up there with you. I think I'll turn in early to-night; I'm
+pretty well knocked. I'll see you in the Quad before noon to-morrow."
+
+Lyman went, and the Psychology man, refilling his pipe, stared at the
+fire and smoked until midnight.
+
+"I don't know," he thought, as he settled into bed, "it may be only a
+case of dual personality, it may be something greater. I've got where I
+must guard against myself."
+
+With an intensified interest, the coach resumed his work over Ashley. He
+waited for a recurrence of the phenomenon which Lyman had marked and he
+yielded again to the general excitement over the approaching contest.
+Absorbed in the two unrelated interests, he gradually came to connect
+them. This he kept to himself.
+
+The last campus practice was half over, the bleachers were crowded.
+Across the field the confirmed fiends were standing along the ropes to
+get a nearer view of that tangle of human bodies, not a movement of
+which escaped them. On the side-lines the privileged advisers, from
+rubbers and Freshman manager up to associate coach, squatted on the
+adobe, careless of their clothes.
+
+The whole University had come out. An air of sorrow hung over
+everything, the rooters were silent, and the teams played listlessly.
+
+Frank Lyman went over where the wildest howlers usually sat.
+
+"Boys," he said, "we can't send the men away like this, it would take
+them a week to get over it. We must have some yelling. We're not
+honoring the memory of Blake this way. Do you know what his last words
+were? He said to Professor Diemann, 'They know I never was a quitter.'
+Do you think he would like a practice like this?"
+
+Then the crowd started up and gave the yell as one man, and the others
+joined in until something like the usual demonstration arose about the
+field, and the 'Varsity, feeling the inspiration, bent down and hammered
+away at the Scrubs as they meant to do against the Blue and Gold on
+Thanksgiving day. Here and there a fraternity dog, showing his head
+between a pair of golf-clad knees, joined the quick, sharp yell of the
+people about him with an imitation that raised a laugh. When the
+bleachers were still just before a big play, one could hear in the
+breathless silence the slap of the canvas suits, the thud of heavy
+shoes, the sniffling of men just out of a scrimmage. Far across the bay,
+the hills that were cool and blue when practice began, grew luminously
+red in the level light of the dying rays; against the fading color of
+the west, the power-house chimney rose picturesquely dark; the swift,
+elusive twilight of California settled down on Santa Clara's broad
+acres, so that Diemann had to stare hard to follow Ashley's play. Then
+the whistle sounded, sharp in the still air, and the teams came trotting
+to the side-lines to take their sweaters and caps from devoted admirers
+and to stroll off, arm over shoulder, with people who minded not in the
+least the campus dirt those heroes had been gathering.
+
+Diemann took Ashley's arm. "Let's walk together," he said.
+
+The substitute fullback had been playing hard ball. The gloom hanging
+over the first half of the practice had affected him strongly and he had
+flung himself into the game, trying to forget, to cast off the foolish
+sense of an implied reproach. Diemann could see that he was very tired.
+He made him lean upon him, and they started for the Hall. Suddenly he
+realized that the football man was not answering questions, that the
+weight on his own shoulder was growing heavier. He glanced up into
+Ashley's face; there was an absent look in the man's eyes.
+
+"Fred!" whispered Diemann sharply in his ear.
+
+"Yes?" answered the fullback; then he shook himself and said:
+
+"It's chilly, Die, I'm wet. Let's get in."
+
+Some fifteen minutes later, the two came down the corridor toward the
+training table.
+
+"Good-night, Ashley."
+
+"Won't you stay to dinner, Diemann?"
+
+"No, I must go down, and you are late as it is. Hurry along in."
+
+"All right. I'm not going stale if I can help it. I just felt a little
+faint over there; I got pretty tired."
+
+Diemann stepped up closer to him beside the curving balustrade and
+looked the football man steadily in the eyes.
+
+"You are playing more like Blake every day," he said.
+
+"I wish I were."
+
+"We are going to the Springs to-morrow," went on the coach, "and you can
+rest. By the way, if I were you I wouldn't say anything about your
+feeling faint just now. It would only trouble Lyman and the rest of the
+boys."
+
+"What does it all mean?" Diemann mused as the palms bordering the
+bicycle path flashed by him. "There was something about him like Fred,
+in his way of speaking, and some of the things he said about the game,
+but it stopped there. With all my questioning, I never got a word that
+belonged to us two alone. I suppose I must admit that it is merely the
+memory of the subjective mind, a case of dual personality brought on by
+hyper-æsthetic conditions. Oh, if it were only the other thing, if I
+only could know! But it can't be; he would give me some clue, some sign.
+Then again the substitution has not come at a critical time, only after
+the practice, when Ashley is tired. If it were Fred, he would appear in
+the play, he would come at a time like that, if there is anything in
+it."
+
+Diemann gripped his handle-bar tightly as he shot through the sandstone
+gates.
+
+"Oh," he thought, "whatever it is, if it would only come stronger, if I
+could only be sure!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On Thanksgiving morning when the long special runs up on the University
+track and stops between the Library and Encina, the flaming bunting
+looped along its sides starts the excitement of the day. Everybody is
+out on the walk, bristling with the College cardinal, from Professor
+Grind and his wife to the Jap who cleans house Saturdays. If there is
+anyone who cannot or does not want to go up to town to-day, he has
+hidden himself in grief or shame. The President wears a ribbon in his
+coat, and talks gravely with Professor Diemann, who has been at the
+Springs with the team. A knot of students have already determined to get
+the Doctor to lead the yell when he comes in to the grounds. They know
+he will do it; he is as full of the spirit of the day as any of them.
+
+    "Rah, Rah, Rah,
+     Rah, Rah, Rah,
+     Rah, Rah,
+     Stanford!"
+
+The engine whistles it, the crowd shouts it, and the
+hills give it back again as the laden train slips down to the main line
+and starts on its way to town. Streaming with cardinal bunting, it looks
+like a burning thing as it rushes over the marsh land, sending the
+horses in the field snorting away, and bringing women to the doors of
+cottages along the tracks. In their excitement the delirious Sophomores
+and Juniors hang out of the windows and throw kisses wildly to these
+women, who grin and wave back, doubtless saying something about "them
+crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet
+under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily
+from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine
+toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags.
+
+From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as
+surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic
+golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the
+streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a
+plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby
+hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a
+villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling
+shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations,
+and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes.
+
+Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you
+know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart
+lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip
+upstairs under the protecting shadow of the associate coach, passing the
+suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of
+Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed
+in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great
+fresh specimen of the lustiest student-body in the world. You take his
+hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to
+the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how
+glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if
+this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for
+the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our
+best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the
+beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow
+like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling
+unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a
+quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.
+
+Diemann found Ashley quiet in his room. The fullback was in splendid
+fettle; the week at the Springs had done him a world of good. There was
+no staleness about him now. It had helped him to be away from the
+College, away from that excited crowd that sat on the bleachers and
+watched him play, demanding that he be like Blake, who had died. He
+breathed more easily in the quiet air of the mountains where the team
+had secret practice. People stopped urging him to be like Blake; only
+Diemann went over the thing again and again, explaining, reminding. Now
+Thanksgiving had come, and the substitute fullback had never felt better
+in his life. He would do his best, and they could not say he had not
+tried.
+
+The manager was radiant over Ashley's condition, and the other men
+slapped Tom's big shoulders and said that he would put up a good game
+for the College. Diemann alone seemed sour-balled. The rest of them knew
+how Blake's death had broken him up, but that was no reason, Lyman said,
+why he need keep nagging the new fullback about Fred. The College
+realized that the two men were hopelessly different, and they were
+fairly reconciled by this time. If the boy played the best that was in
+him, the team might make it in spite of the odds. It was too bad to take
+the spirit out of him by constantly suggesting that he play like Blake.
+The manager said this to Diemann, but the coach only shook his head and
+answered:
+
+"It won't do any harm, Frank, and it may possibly work him up to
+something like Fred's game."
+
+But a week's watching at the Springs had made Diemann despondent. The
+phenomenon he had witnessed the evening of the last practice had not
+appeared again. He had allowed his theories to lead him away into
+impossible hopes. The man on the bed was Ashley, slow, normal, in
+perfect condition, hopeless, and Ashley he would remain. The chance for
+a psychic manifestation ceased when Ashley's football worry was over.
+Opportunity had come and gone, unfruitfully.
+
+That afternoon, the athletic grounds were banked with great flower-beds
+of people, where red and blue and yellow blossomed and faded and burst
+out again as the teams swayed back and forward on the white-lined
+gridiron between. The wild noise of the college yells greeting the
+teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands,
+the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the
+hoarse bellow of the brown paper megaphones,--all this tumult had hushed
+suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board
+seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other
+for the kick-off.
+
+The uproar boomed forth again, and presently the Stanford bleachers
+became silent from breathless watching. The first five minutes of play
+meant most to the cardinal. In that dozen rushes, they could tell
+whether there was a chance of winning or whether the hope of victory had
+died with Blake. The first Berkeley play went at the line and crumpled
+up without gain; again it held and again, until the crowd felt that
+there was more than hope, that the Stanford stone-wall defense would win
+out once more. Yet so closely were the teams matched that they swung
+back and forth without score for a good half.
+
+When the game was almost at the end of the second half, the score was
+tie, 6-6. But Berkeley was sure of the day. She had forced her
+adversaries to their five-yard line, and there were only six minutes
+left to play. Stanford took a desperate brace and Berkeley lost the ball
+on downs. If only Stanford could gain ground now, or if time could be
+called. Nobody wanted a tie, to be sure, but defeat was hard to
+accept,--the first time, too.
+
+Diemann of Stanford crouched on the side-lines with a heart of lead. The
+game was lost. What he had looked for, hoping against hope since play
+was called, had not happened. Ashley had played his usual hard,
+consistent game, straining every muscle, punting longer and higher than
+ever before, but missing stupidly some golden chances, the chances Blake
+would never have let slip by. Diemann had talked to him between halves,
+a few eager words, urging him to quickness, reminding him of Fred. The
+substitute had only shaken his head, and muttered that he was doing his
+best. Toward the end of the second he had shown the severity of the
+strain. Playing his hardest, with despair in his soul, it had told on
+him. In the last scrimmages his work had been very ragged. Indeed, the
+whole team seemed to have slumped, and the Berkeley line had hammered
+them down toward their own goal while precious seconds slipped by.
+
+Now the men lined up rapidly. Stanford tried an end play. No gain.
+Diemann stood back of the team at one side of the goal; he was
+struggling hard to be calm, but he did a strange thing. He seized a
+small megaphone from the hands of an urchin beside him, and just as they
+lined up after Stanford's unsuccessful trial at end, he stepped to the
+white goal line and raising the funnel to his lips shouted in a voice
+audible to every man on both teams:
+
+"Now, Fred Blake, play your game!"
+
+Lyman heard and looked back, wondering.
+
+Ashley heard. He stared at the grandstand with a bewildered, appealing
+face. Then the signal was given. It sent Ashley through tackle. The boy,
+feeling as though he had lost the game for his College where the other
+man would have won, went into the line with the energy of a forlorn
+hope. The Berkeley men gathered their superior force, and the Stanford
+team was lifted up and borne back, a gradually shifting mass, to its own
+goal line.
+
+Were they over? The Berkeley crowd yelled, and an exultant sub threw
+his sweater in the air. No, the teams were up, and the ball was almost
+on the line, not quite. There remained a chance to punt it out of
+danger. Could Ashley do it quickly enough? He had been punting too
+slowly; the other line could surely get through and block his kick, and
+there were only two minutes to play.
+
+Diemann, rigid with anxiety, saw that a Stanford man still lay on the
+ground. Straining his eyes through the dusk, a glance at the team told
+him that it was Ashley. The drawn muscles of the instructor's legs
+trembled, the blood beat in his temples. Was it coming, at the last
+moment?
+
+As the trainer shot out from the side-lines with bucket and sponge,
+Diemann saw Ashley spring up, slap the grimy moleskins of the men
+nearest him, and get back into position to kick. Stanford was standing
+on her own goal line. He saw the ball snapped back; the fullback kicked
+it, in time; then, instead of the long, curving drive that was to save
+the day, he saw the ball rise almost straight in the air above the
+teams, and he groaned aloud as the Berkeley men broke through, and
+people with delirious laughter waved the blue and gold frantically about
+him.
+
+The ball comes down among the struggling players. Suddenly, out of that
+jumble of men darts a red-sleeved figure, dashing through the scattered
+field, bounding like a stag toward the Berkeley goal.
+
+The expert eye of the associate coach tells him that, by a marvellous
+piece of football instinct, Ashley has found his way through the
+confused teams, realizing that he is the only Stanford man on side, and
+has caught the ball on the fly and got clear with it. Though they
+understand nothing of this, the vast crowd goes shrieking to its feet.
+The bewildered teams turn and follow close upon the flying figure, the
+speedy Berkeley right-half leading them. Back in the field stands the U.
+C. fullback, grimly waiting. The two collide, and the chasing halfback
+gains; but the Berkeley back drops to the tackle a fraction of an
+instant too late and runs fair against a straight-arm. Tom Ashley, with
+the ball clutched tight against his breast, his set face gleaming white
+in the half-light, sprints down the long barred space toward victory,
+keeping the distance between himself and the straining pack, running as
+only one man has ever run for Stanford.
+
+And Diemann, tearing along the side-line, knows that Ashley himself
+never could have done it.
+
+The fullback falls across the line, the ball gripped in his convulsive
+hold, just as the linesman's whistle blows. Diemann is there almost as
+soon. He keeps back the frenzied men crowding about them, and bends over
+the unconscious player, calling him "Fred" irrationally, while the place
+catches fire with the cardinal and Stanford goes mad on the field.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ashley came to consciousness at the hotel. Diemann sat beside him, and
+Lyman and Dr. Forest stood by the window. The substitute fullback sat
+up.
+
+"I felt faint just then," he said. "I couldn't help it; you know about
+it, Diemann." He looked at the other men.
+
+"Did they get it over?" he asked.
+
+Lyman ran across the room.
+
+"Tom, old man," he said, choking, "you won it for us, and you'll never
+be forgotten, you and your run!"
+
+The fullback looked at him blankly.
+
+"My run?" he faltered.
+
+Diemann came between them.
+
+"Better lie down and rest a bit, my boy; you can talk later."
+
+Then, turning to the others:
+
+"You see," he whispered, "he's wandering a little yet."
+
+
+
+
+TWO PIONEERS AND AN AUDIENCE.
+
+
+
+
+Two Pioneers and an Audience.
+
+    "The Mother sits beside the bay,
+      The bay goes down to wed the sea,
+    And gone ye are, on every tide
+      Wherever men and waters be!"
+
+
+On the Sunday night following the Game the smoking-room at the Rho house
+held the greater part of the Chapter. As a rule, there were not so many
+loafing there Sunday nights; that time was generally given either to
+sentiment in other places, or to digging out Monday's work upstairs,
+while the fire burned for the two or three who seemed never to have any
+work more important than magazine reading or solitaire. To-night,
+however, nearly every one was gathered there, for two "old men" were
+visiting.
+
+These old men had been out of college for two whole years. One of them
+was Ralph Shirlock. If you were at college in his days you knew him by
+sight, at least, though you were the mossiest dig that ever kept bright
+till morning the attic window of a prof's house on the Row. If you have
+come up to College since then, and are sufficiently posted to know that
+there have been other annuals before this one just issued by your
+friends the Juniors, you have found his picture or his name on every
+other page of the earlier editions. Harry Rice, who came with him, was
+not half so well known, save to the Faculty and the circle of the
+chapter. He was doing very well in business, people said, better than
+Shirlock, probably. Rice was a keen fellow, the new men could see that
+at a glance; but they did not put an arm about him instinctively in the
+after-dinner stroll, as they did about Shirlock.
+
+The two alumni had spent Sunday calling upon the Faculty in Palo Alto
+and the Row, and in post-mortems with some of the football men in
+Encina. After dinner, the fellows sat out on the porch, strumming
+mandolins and singing. Shirlock had been a star on the Glee Club two
+years before, and he sang again the songs the college hummed after him
+in those days, while the upper-classmen looked at the Freshmen with a
+"now-you-see-what-you've-joined" expression, or nudged each other
+reminiscently, until the live-oaks in the pasture almost blended with
+the long shadows under them, and hoarse-throated frogs were tuning up in
+the irrigating ditches. Then they formed four abreast and went down for
+the mail, humming a march song and lifting their hats in concert to
+Professor Stillwell and his wife, smiling from their porch. At the
+post-office the lines broke and the entire body, except the alumni,
+struggled into the over-crowded room ("the daily press" Pellams called
+it). This was hardly necessary, since one man could have opened the
+fraternity box and distributed the letters; but this is a distinct charm
+of Sunday evening at the post-office. Moreover, you never know who may
+be standing inside, and if you have forgotten to arrange things ahead it
+is sometimes well to be first.
+
+The pleasant uncertainty of the evening mail being over, the fellows
+mixed a while with the sundry groups about the low red building, then
+joined forces again, and marched once around the Quad, arm in arm, a
+line of sixteen, while Bob Duncan, who had been prepped at a military
+school, shouted, "Change step, march," and "Left wheel, march," then
+home together, all but two or three, who were called the "Incurables,"
+and who had plunged back into the shadow of the Quad for Chapel,
+perhaps, or some other form of Sabbath evening devotion. This breach of
+hospitality the alumni forgave, made indulgent by a sweet sympathy.
+
+Alas for you, old worshippers at empty shrines! Those divine presences
+are gone, new and unknown deities queen it in the ancient temples. Go
+back to the hearth where some still know you and talk to the few who
+gather around you there, of the old days when you, too, placed your
+offering at celestial feet. These men of a new generation, sitting in
+places that once were yours, will listen indulgently to your stories of
+the past, and hear with patience the odious comparisons you inevitably
+make; they will thank you for the advice you give them, and say
+something pleasant about your college spirit; then in the morning when
+you have taken the early train back to the World, they will go down to
+the Quad with their books under their arms and something in their minds
+that is anything but your talk of the evening before; the College life
+will go on very much as if you had not been back, O wise fossils, and
+there will be new graduates going out to learn your lessons and new
+undergraduates who will pay no attention to them in turn. So be thankful
+for this brief hour before the fire, with its chat as light as the
+tobacco smoke floating over "old" man and Freshman lounging together, be
+glad of the fellowship that welcomes you, and be content.
+
+Each couch in the smoking-room had its load of sprawling figures. The
+lights were out by this time and the Incurables had come back to the
+house and ferreted places for themselves among the tangled golf suits
+and 'Varsity sweaters. Duncan had a lamp on the table where he was
+"bossing a rabbit"; Pellams said this was the only kind of lab-work in
+zoology in which Bob could get credit. A pile of plates warmed before
+the fire where Smith was toasting crackers at the end of a sharpened
+stick. At the piano, Pellams was softly playing "barber shop" chords. It
+was all very lazy and comfortable. The alumni grew reminiscent.
+
+"This noon while we were walking up from Palo Alto," said Shirlock,
+"Mrs. Stanford passed us in her carriage, coming from Chapel, I suppose.
+I asked Harry if he remembered how they used to drive about the place
+inspecting things, when the Senator was alive."
+
+"Of course I do," spoke up Rice, "it seems odd that there are so few in
+college now who remember them together. To you fellows, I suppose, Mrs.
+Stanford is the source of the University. To us who saw them stand
+together on the platform that day in October, '91, it is the two
+always."
+
+"Harry, do you remember our serenade at the residence, after they
+returned from Washington the first time?"
+
+"No," answered Rice, "I remember, but I wasn't there. We played a game
+somewhere that day and I stayed over and missed the fun."
+
+"Tell us about it, Ralph," said Duncan, as he emptied the cubes of
+cheese into the chafing-dish.
+
+"Well, you see," said Shirlock, unbraiding himself from two affectionate
+under-classmen on the couch and sitting up in the light, "the story
+really begins with the first football game, which came off in the spring
+of '92, and was ours, as every Freshman can tell you, even though he
+doesn't know just what is meant by 'Pioneers.' The day of the game,
+Whittemore, the captain, got a telegram from Washington wishing us luck
+in our first encounter, and that afternoon we sent back answer in much
+the same style that Cæsar used on one occasion--I suppose the little man
+to my left here can give me the Latin words?" he added, rumpling the
+hair of a horizontal Freshman.
+
+"Not long afterward the Senator and Mrs. Stanford came back from the
+East and someone over in the Hall proposed that we give them a welcome
+home. We could get a bigger demonstration there in those days than you
+can now, I'll bet; you know everybody who was anybody at all lived in
+Encina then; that was the center of the College life, politics began and
+grew up there, and it was over there in the old lobby that we started
+the Stanford spirit. Things were great, that first year. It's all right
+enough here by our own fireside, with our own little gang, but I tell
+you honestly if things could have lasted as they were that first year, I
+wouldn't have wanted to come over here. We were all together, right in
+line for everything, wise or foolish."
+
+"It was the student body then, all right," put in Rice, "and we had the
+Faculty with us too whether we were around the gridiron, where they
+first had it, east of the cinder path, you know, learning the yell and
+incidentally getting the team into condition for that 14-10, or whether
+we were crawling by our lonelies through the fence over in the
+vineyard."
+
+    "The days of grapes,
+     The days of scrapes,"
+
+sang Pellams from the piano.
+
+"Were there any profs on that flat-car?" interrupted Duncan. He had come
+into College while a memory of that pioneer adventure yet lingered.
+
+"It's unkind to remind us of that affair! No, I don't think there were.
+The Faculty had their fun later, and we put mourning wreaths on several
+chairs in the dining-room."
+
+"And you came mighty near getting a bouquet of the same kind, yourself,"
+said Rice.
+
+"What was it about the flat-car?" inquired a voice from the pillows.
+
+"Oh," said Rice, "that was about the first of those senseless
+ebullitions of youth that the Shirlock person usually identified himself
+with. There was a flat-car standing outside Encina on the track there,
+just about where it turns and slopes down crosslots to the main track.
+This is just what Ralph and his precious gang wanted, of course; they
+thought it would be a bit of innocent, boyish play to have a little free
+railroading, so they piled on and turned her loose and slid down to
+Mayfield. They barely stopped the car before she switched into the main
+line, and they all fell off into the gopher holes along the side and
+made for Mayfield, red-eyed. The Faculty raised Ned when they heard
+about it, which was proper."
+
+"I hope the Freshmen will pay particular attention to Mr. Rice," said
+Shirlock. "He is a noble influence to any sweet, unfolding soul. I feel
+that I should have escaped a great deal of enjoyable sin had I only
+known him better those first few weeks."
+
+Ralph got up for some cigarette tobacco from the skull on the
+mantelpiece.
+
+"Well, the Faculty were with us in about everything," he went on,
+rolling a cigarette; "many of them lived in the Hall then."
+
+"Yes, a number did," put in Rice. "Do you remember, Ralph, the night
+that Professor Torts had his little beer-and-skittles party in his
+lair, and Burns, who roomed across the passage and who was the worst
+bummer in Encina, went down to Fessler, and complained that he couldn't
+study because of the noise in that number? And Fessler forgot who roomed
+there and came up and gave them Tartarus through the keyhole and nearly
+dropped when Torts opened the door?"
+
+"We all enjoyed that," answered Shirlock. "Why, the profs used to come
+to our feeds and jolly up with the crowd. Often they were the best fun
+there. It's different now."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Duncan, "they come over off and on, now. Doc
+Jordan was here last Sunday to dinner, and Diemann drops in sometimes;
+last year he came a lot."
+
+"Oh, they come over all right," sighed Pellams from the piano. "I had a
+report to make one day. I didn't have it done, and I bribed Ted to go
+down and tell Engbee I was sick in bed. I was playing cards in here when
+Sniffles rushed in and told me the old boy was coming up the street. I
+smelt danger and tumbled into bed like a six-day bicyclist, and fixed my
+face up with some grease paint and magnesia. Sure enough, he came in,
+darkly suspicious, thought he had me all right, but he found a wreck
+that melted him. His wife sent me a bunch of violets next morning. For
+my part I don't like the Faculty for intimate friends," and Pellams
+played "Comrades" with the soft pedal down.
+
+"It's not the same thing, though, really," persisted Shirlock. "They may
+come over here to dinner or perhaps to a smoker, but it's always
+Professor So-and-So; his chair is a little higher than any of yours, and
+he never forgets the family waiting for him in the Row; in those first
+days the family was in most cases beyond the Rockies, or as yet a dream,
+and it wasn't always easy to pick out the professor from the jumble of
+story-tellers on the bed.
+
+"Of course, it was all too good to last," the alumnus went on
+thoughtfully, "and it wasn't natural it should. We weren't so many then.
+When the number increased, I suppose the relations had to change and the
+different cliques must separate. I'll admit that there is more in the
+life now, it's more complex, there are more institutions and more ways
+of having joy; but those were good old days, those first days in Encina
+when the crowd was one.
+
+"I can see them now, can't you, Harry? out on the veranda and the steps
+of the Hall after dinner, with the fellows playing ball on the lawn, and
+other men sitting up on their window-ledges. The night I started to tell
+you about, when we went to serenade Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, we got the
+mandolin fellows, the beginning of your present club, and fell in
+behind them and started off down the road, past the mausoleum and
+through the vineyard--never broke ranks there, either, we were on our
+good behavior, besides, it was Spring--and so on over to the house,
+where we drew up, and the mandolins played their piece, then we gave the
+yell--it was only a few months old, that yell, but it had been loud
+enough to knock out a twenty-five-year-old one we met up in town not
+long before, and we were proud of it.
+
+"During the pause that followed, the front door opened and the Senator
+stepped out on the porch; a lamp shone on his gray head and on us
+fellows in a big black crowd on the gravel below, looking up at him and
+cheering. When we stopped he said, very much as though a friend had
+driven up, "Gentlemen, will you come in?" and the whole two hundred of
+us piled over the piazza, getting a grasp of his hand as we came into
+the hall, and a word from Mrs. Stanford, who stood beside him. They took
+us into the library; we formed a hollow square, two rows deep on the
+sides, and the Founders came into the square and talked to us. I
+remember that Mrs. Stanford said, 'We were very glad, young gentlemen,
+to hear of your success in baseball,' and what a chill it gave us, just
+convalescing from the football fever; but we forgave the mistake when
+she asked, a minute later, 'Which is Mr. Clemans?' That blushing hero
+with the other ten we forced into the center to be congratulated, and we
+sang the new song, 'Rush the Ball Along,' until the bric-à-brac
+trembled.
+
+"When we were quiet again, the Senator talked to us informally, as
+though we were in reality his children as he had said we were to be. It
+was an earnest talk, about his ideals of what the University was yet to
+be, and his hope for their fulfillment; of economy and judicious living;
+and of endeavor to be of use to the world. It was a privilege to stand
+there listening. He appealed to each one of us individually. We could
+not know then how few more such opportunities we were to have. When he
+had finished, the dining-room doors slid back--it was a put-up job, that
+serenade--and it was Mrs. Stanford's turn. After the supper, we gathered
+for a little personal talk with both of them, then we had some more
+mandolin music, and Baker sang 'Suwanee River' to Capron's
+accompaniment.
+
+"That evening brought the Founders pretty close to the crowd. It was a
+good thing to have happen, it began things right. Then, you know, he
+died suddenly, in vacation. I was in Yosemite. When term opened, it was
+hard to get used to seeing her driving around the campus alone. I don't
+think any of the people who came after those early days can ever be so
+loyal to the Founders, to the person of one and the memory of the other,
+as we are. I'm sure none of us who went over serenading that night will
+ever forget it. It's one of the Pioneer memories."
+
+Both graduates were looking into the fire. Freshman Haviland snored
+softly in the window seat. The eyes of the rest of the chapter were
+fastened on the chafing-dish. Shirlock's story had seemed pretty long
+and the rarebit sent out a tantalizing odor.
+
+Duncan called out, "Supper's ready, children," and the heated plates
+came clattering up from the hearth, bringing the visitors back from the
+far echoes of their own beginnings to the noisy unconcern of a Freshman
+year that knew a kind, white-bearded face from pictures only, and never
+could understand.
+
+
+
+
+FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT.
+
+
+
+
+For the Sake of Argument.
+
+    "For we are frank and twenty
+      And the spring is in the air!"
+                              HOVEY.
+
+
+"Well!" said Miss Meiggs, spreading across her lap one of the Beta Rhos'
+new monogrammed napkins, "I must say _your_ being here is a surprise."
+
+Pellams answered in vague interrogation, not a little surprised,
+himself, to be caught at a "girl-supper." Now that he was cornered, it
+would be uselessly impolite to tell her how the Chapter had reasoned and
+pleaded with him until at the last minute "Cap" Smith ruined his clever
+escape by catching him midway down a porch pillar. Smith, sitting on the
+other side of Katharine Graham and wearing the smile of satisfied
+revenge, would doubtless enjoy telling it. There was so much of genial
+malevolence in that smile that Pellams, the woman-hater, who knew only
+enough of the co-eds to avoid them, wondered what sort of a girl he had
+been placed next to at supper. He had an intuitive idea that she had
+been given him by general consent. An experienced society man would have
+scented this at once in the company of Mrs. Perkins, for when there is
+a choice of tables, chapter-mothers are apt to sit where there is the
+least sentiment; but this was the Junior's début, practically, and he
+was conscious of little more than that the fellows had it "in" for him,
+and that this girl had begun the conversation by a personal remark.
+
+"I judged," the girl was saying, not having waited for any explanation,
+"that in the milder forms of social entertainment you were somewhat out
+of your element."
+
+Pellams had missed his guess. On sitting down to their small table, he
+had decided that the conversation would naturally split into two
+divisions of three rather than into three couples, for Mrs. Perkins,
+Professor Grind and this Meiggs girl would enjoy themselves together,
+leaving him to share Smith's talk with Miss Graham, whose eyes had
+somehow an engaging twinkle. The idea was rudely dispelled by Miss
+Meiggs's immediate and decidedly personal attack. At least, he would
+have preferred to talk about other people, but he faced the music.
+
+"Oh, I disapprove of them only for myself," he replied, "not for
+others."
+
+"And why for yourself, particularly?"
+
+The face of the Glee Club's comedian had assumed just the right
+seriousness.
+
+"Because I'm more than susceptible and I don't want to run risks."
+
+"Your time has come at last, then," put in his captor, Smith, with a
+gallant look at Miss Meiggs.
+
+"Not at all," retorted Pellams, whose combative sense was less rusty
+than his skill in compliment. "If I'd been afraid of one exposure like
+this, do you think I'd have suggested being on deck to-night?"
+
+Smith, with a fresh memory of their struggle, laughed at this blocking
+move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's
+unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of
+late there had been a little rift in their sisterly love.
+
+The older girl was not disconcerted. She had her estimate of Pellams
+Chase, and he was not disproving it. There were certain things she had
+long wanted the chance to say to him.
+
+"I admire your self-restraint under temptation," she said; "it is
+characteristic of you in other circumstances, I believe"--this with
+discreet emphasis--"but, really, why should you dread letting _this_
+susceptibility get the better of you?"
+
+Pellams caught the faint sneer in the words. He hoped that Mrs. Perkins
+had been talking just then to her Faculty partner. Increasing his
+affected earnestness, he replied:
+
+"Because, when you get gone, it is bound to knock scholarship."
+
+Here Smith giggled audibly, for Katharine and he were really feigning
+talk, being more entertained by the couple across the cloth. Katharine
+knew that by this last statement Pellams had sounded a dominant note in
+the soul of her opinionated sister. She was not surprised, then, when
+Miss Meiggs turned more fully toward the woman-hater.
+
+"Tell me, are you one of these people who think co-education an evil?"
+
+"I'm afraid I am." The speech gave Pellams a certain pleasure. There was
+nothing about this partner they had given him that tended toward
+converting him to the Chapter's point of view as to the advantage of
+girls at college.
+
+"Of course," continued she, "I do not take your remark about scholarship
+as worthy of consideration in your case, because I am in one or two of
+your classes, when you attend them," and Pellams, listening, gave thanks
+that he and Professor Grind opposite had no such relation; "but
+monopolized time is really the cry of a good many who would wish to
+work, and it is all wrong. There is no reason why we should not come
+here and work with you, combining friendship and study. Our presence
+here is, in a way, preventive of many worse things."
+
+Pellams turned his empty salad plate between his fingers.
+
+"Well," he drawled, "I'm not sure I know what you mean by the worse
+things, and I've never been to another college, except Berkeley but I
+can't believe as much time is spent on them as some people here give to
+girls," this with a dreamy look over Smith's head; "the cigarette heart
+can't be much worse than what takes men out of college here, and if you
+refer to beer----"
+
+"I _do_ refer to beer," said Miss Meiggs, in an iced voice.
+
+"Oh, no!" expostulated the Junior, spreading his hands, "they couldn't
+do it!" He looked at her frankly. "You get a head after too much beer,"
+he went on, reckless as to pronouns and listening professors, "and you
+stay sober and work, for awhile, any way. In co-education you don't get
+any such call-down until the Committee meets."
+
+"Don't let him tease you, Miss Meiggs," put in Mrs. Perkins, frowning
+mildly at Pellams because of Professor Grind's sphinx-like smile; "he's
+making it all up out of his inner consciousness, like the German
+philosopher and the--elephant, wasn't it, Professor Grind?"
+
+"Yes?" answered Miss Meiggs, with a world of irony packed into the
+syllable; "your inner consciousness, then, Mr. Chase, proves rather
+forcibly that in one case the influence is against refinement, while in
+the case of co-education it is all for it. You will grant that, I
+think?"
+
+Quite by accident, Pellams caught Miss Graham's eye. The twinkle there
+was a sort of glorified "sic 'im!"
+
+"On the contrary," said he, perfectly composed, "I think it's the girl
+that's refined."
+
+Miss Meiggs's "_What!_" was almost a shriek. Foo, the table-boy, brought
+her just then a plate of creamy rarebit. He had a jacket of luminous
+green silk, with the fraternity monogram in white, and he wore his cue
+hanging. But the fragrance of the rarebit and the splendor of Foo's
+toilet were alike lost upon the aroused Miss Meiggs. Such a statement,
+from this man of all others!
+
+"You are judging us with yourself as a basis of contrast, I fancy!"
+
+Not displeased at having put her in ill-humor, and refusing a gentle
+attempt on Mrs. Perkins' part to lead the conversation elsewhere, he
+went on with aggravated seriousness:
+
+"But there is hope for me here, with the Faculty and with books"--he
+choked a little over this; "a man doesn't need to go through from one to
+eight love-affairs."
+
+The champion of co-education sniffed.
+
+"Nothing was further from my thoughts," said she. "The association of
+men and women in an atmosphere of study does not mean sentimentality.
+The relation should be normal and helpful, not spoiled by extremes."
+Katharine had heard these views before.
+
+"But they can't dodge the extremes, you see," persisted Pellams. "It's
+the place here, the walks and drives in the country and all. Your theory
+might work all right at a city college or even at Berkeley, but on this
+campus, not so!"
+
+"The reasoning of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature
+than boy-and-girl foolishness--unless one is idle. Where it results in
+that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to
+scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"--with these
+words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A
+man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in
+the country at the same time."
+
+"But all the girls are not like you," began Pellams, and stopped at the
+sound of the words. They were not in the least intended to be taken as
+he felt that the table-full had taken them. Miss Meiggs put her fork
+viciously into the neglected rarebit. In the uncomfortable pause, Mrs.
+Perkins flutteringly passed her the cayenne pepper, but Miss Meiggs
+ignored the courtesy. She turned to Pellams.
+
+"Even a love-affair," she snapped, "would benefit you more than the
+substitute you have chosen! You are a nice one to argue the refinement
+of the college girl! Are you refining yourself, your fraternity or your
+favorite side of the student-body by carousing at Mayfield and carrying
+the viciousness of that town to others where you may represent the
+University?"
+
+"Oh, I say!" protested the Glee Club man, uneasily, for Grind was on the
+Committee; "don't be too hard on me."
+
+"I'm sure you're unjust to Pellams," said the Chapter-mother, with a
+troubled look at her black lamb, who wondered what was coming: "I don't
+believe he----"
+
+Miss Meiggs, peppering her rarebit deliberately, interrupted, with a
+little toss of the head.
+
+"I will ask Mr. Chase one question then." She gathered some of the
+cheese upon her fork, and, balancing it midway to her mouth, went on
+with a gloating clearness of enunciation. "Please tell us why you came
+to the afternoon concert at the Chico Normal School this summer in a
+colored shirt and your dress suit, and why you did not sing your part of
+the program?"
+
+"That's two questions," murmured Pellams. He could not look at Mrs.
+Perkins, to whom he had made certain solemn promises before that very
+trip; but his adversary had turned toward her with a look of righteous
+triumph. So deftly that even Pellams barely saw it, Katharine reached
+across him and peppered the forkful of rarebit just before the lips of
+Miss Meiggs closed over it. His answer was overlooked.
+
+Mrs. Perkins took the sufferer up to her own room and Katharine vanished
+somewhere with Smith. When the tables were removed, a girl sat at the
+piano; her song finished, she struck briskly into the "Hot Time," and
+every one turned to Pellams. He sang the rag-time as though he were
+bursting with fun, while the Chapter sat before him, beaming its
+innocent gratitude. But the Glee Club man was singing to one guest
+alone, and he could not see her, or Smith either. When two songs had
+failed to bring her into view, he stole off upstairs unmolested and lay
+for some time with his door locked, grinning before sleep.
+
+They hammered at his door next morning with appeals for his appearance
+at first-hour recitation, and fraternal reminders that he hadn't
+sufficient stand-in to cut. Foo went clanging the bell through the
+halls, dodging the shoes that flew at him through the door of a man who
+had nothing before the fourth hour, and the rush and hurry of late
+breakfast-time filled the house. But Pellams lay smoking in his narrow
+bed, engaged in the novel task of solving a point of etiquette. The
+affair of the night before was to be his final appearance in local
+society. His experience in small-talk with Miss Meiggs confirmed his
+decision to live a college life into which co-education did not enter
+outside his class-rooms. Yet, having once departed from the mode of such
+a life, he found himself under an obligation. A co-ed had found him in
+trouble and had done the "white" thing by him at a critical moment; even
+Jimmy Mason, over at the Hall, could not have stood by him any better.
+In an obligation to Jimmy there was no problem--only the matter of time
+to do his part--but with a co-ed, Pellams felt that it was different.
+She was not a feature of his life. To the woman-hater's mind, if a man
+has become indebted to a girl, honor bids him pay the debt, the sooner
+the better. He need never see the girl again, once the score is even.
+This philosophy evolved, it took another cigarette to decide just how
+the balance could be struck, and then Pellams went downstairs to wheedle
+a remnant of breakfast from the indulgent Foo.
+
+Applied to the new element into which he had ventured, something of the
+keen observation which the Junior devoted to football practice might
+have made the payment of his debt to Katharine Graham a transaction of
+less public note. He would have waited, probably, with the brazenness
+that characterizes local courtship, at the door of the library and
+caught her as she emerged. Or he would have learned what mails she
+usually waited for at the post-office and would have lingered until she
+had opened her box and had started back toward the Quad pretending to
+look over her correspondence. Or else he would have watched her classes
+and happened along by accident just as she was coming out for a vacant
+hour. But these established forms had escaped his notice. Instead, he
+did what he considered the "proper," and drove dashingly up to Roble in
+Paulsen's best single rig and his own new fall suit.
+
+Roble caught sight of him beyond the flower beds, over the heads of the
+tall pampas. The news electrified the dormitory. A Freshman stopped her
+experimental lab-work with the piano, and joined the others behind the
+lace at the parlor windows. A group of girls, chatting on the yellow
+railing of the steps, watched the approach of the apparition. Pellams
+Chase coming to Roble! Not since the morning Mt. Hamilton was covered
+with snow had there been such a phenomenon.
+
+"I believe he's coming to take Florence to drive!" said a mischievous
+Theta Gamma, looking toward Miss Meiggs, who sat frowning at the
+approaching buggy.
+
+"He ought to," laughed Katharine Graham's roommate, "for not telling her
+how much red pepper she had put on her rarebit while she was absorbed in
+talking to him!"
+
+"If he's coming for me," said the Senior grimly, "I shall not disappoint
+him."
+
+"What!" cried Katharine; "you wouldn't go with him, Florence! Why, we
+none of us met him until last night."
+
+"Last night I was unfortunately absent-minded," answered Miss Meiggs,
+"and I did not say all I wanted to. It wouldn't be a pleasant drive!"
+
+"He would have you at his mercy--you shan't go!" laughed another girl,
+"it would be flying in the face of Providence as well as of Propriety!"
+
+"I can't imagine whom he's coming for," said Katharine, who was sure
+that he was coming for her. She thought out the severe little refusal
+she should make him when he had drawn her aside.
+
+The stranger scraped his buggy wheels delicately along the curbing of
+the Roble walk. The group of girls on the steps was an unexpected
+ordeal. He caught sight of the amused faces behind the curtains above
+him and almost lost his nerve.
+
+"Rubber!" he growled. He had made many a clever entrance in the student
+theatricals, but to-day in climbing out of the buggy he got badly
+tangled in the reins. In spite of his desperate will, his face was
+growing red. With painfully fixed gaze he came up the steps toward the
+Theta Gammas; standing uneasily before them, he blurted out, with no
+preliminaries whatever:
+
+"Miss Graham, would you like to go driving?"
+
+Katharine straightened and looked at him coolly. One of the girls gave a
+little gasp at his impertinence.
+
+"It isn't customary, I believe," said Katharine, "to ask to go driving
+with a girl you have met once, at a supper."
+
+"Isn't it?" faltered Pellams. There was not a vestige of his usual
+bravado about him. Katharine met his honest gaze, hesitated, then said:
+
+"But I shall be delighted to go, just the same. Will you come in and
+wait till I get my things?"
+
+They curved round the Dormitory lawn and away toward the La Honda
+redwoods, leaving the astounded young women on the porch to discuss, as
+women sometimes do, the peculiar behavior of their departed sister.
+
+She explained it to Pellams during the drive. To his surprise, he
+learned that he had been hopelessly ill-bred to ask her at all; that had
+the invitation not been given before the other girls he should have
+driven away alone. As it was, she was in for no end of criticism. She
+discouraged any conversation upon the subject of cayenne pepper.
+Furthermore, she declared herself in full accord with Florence Meiggs
+as regarded love affairs; she believed in them as little as her elder
+sister; good-fellowship, without sentiment, was possible and quite
+sufficient. Pellams, having resolved upon the utmost good-nature during
+the drive, put the pride of the livery stable through her best paces and
+allowed his companion to declare her views unquestioned. Toward the end
+of the afternoon, he deposited her at the Roble door with a pleasant
+feeling that he had done his duty and was through with co-eds forever.
+
+A wild uproar filled the Rho dining-room when the gallant came in to
+dinner, late. With an exasperating readiness of conclusion, the crowd
+congratulated him upon his change of heart, they welcomed to their
+ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and
+Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own:
+
+    "Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,
+      Swore upon the book
+    For wife he'd have a cider-can,
+      For bed the ingle-nook--
+      Petticoats he thus forsook!"
+
+Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty
+and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not
+divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.
+
+[Illustration: THEY DROVE AWAY TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS.]
+
+His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her
+deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had
+stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason
+and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on
+the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was
+about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as
+on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him
+out to be confirmed.
+
+"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He
+hasn't--where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then
+stopped, paralyzed.
+
+It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle
+of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper,
+Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the
+Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason,
+the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun
+shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their
+perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the
+'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You
+wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"
+
+"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on
+love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When
+I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my
+misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a
+straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they
+tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort
+of a thing makes me tres fatigué and I've a scheme."
+
+"Not your first, is it?"
+
+"In what way do you--"
+
+"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and
+the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."
+
+"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled.
+His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club
+stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew
+rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.
+
+This grin was not lost upon Katharine.
+
+"What am I to do, pray?" asked she; "pose as Professor of Domestic
+Economy?"
+
+"This is a bird of a josh on the house," he cried. "You'll come in on
+it, won't you?"
+
+"Plans first, before I commit myself. You might want me to elope in a
+buggy."
+
+"Never again!" declared Pellams; "my idea is, why can't we pretend to
+have a case on each other--not any passing fancy, but a real peacherino,
+like the best of them?"
+
+Somewhat to his surprise, the girl was not visibly enthusiastic.
+
+"Just how do I profit, please, if I butcher myself to make your Roman
+holiday?"
+
+"You can die happy, knowing we've pulled their le--bluffed 'em
+beautifully. You're down on love-affairs yourself, you told--"
+
+"Your philosophy of heaven includes a josh on the other fellow, I verily
+believe," returned Katharine, smiling; "but it is just possible, you
+know--shall I be very frank?"
+
+"You have been, before!"
+
+"Well, then, I might, you know, prefer the society of some other men in
+college to the exclusive privilege of yours, even with this wonderful
+josh thrown in."
+
+"Who, Smith?"
+
+"There are others."
+
+"I know I'm not much of a sq--ladies'-man," he persisted; "but I can
+learn, can't I?"
+
+"Your manners are not very dreadful when you think about them; but oh,
+you have lots to master, the little things, you know."
+
+"I let you carry your books this morning--"
+
+"Bravo!--if you only learn to think of them sooner--all the little ways
+a girl--"
+
+"Sure--you can teach me and rap my knuckles--"
+
+"That would be a pleasure. I've wanted to do it for months."
+
+"And, you see, you'd have the distinction of being the only one I
+couldn't hold out against."
+
+"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."
+
+"That means you will think of it?"
+
+"You're really not half bad! You caught _that_ on time. Yes, I'll help
+you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on
+trial you understand."
+
+Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he
+would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for
+the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the
+sides, as his mother's did.
+
+On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at
+an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor.
+Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to
+be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of
+Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and
+scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a
+perfect novice.
+
+During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The
+experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be
+joshed than to josh--when you know in your heart you have the joke on
+the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old
+Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed
+and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of
+interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this
+was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and
+teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his
+dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel
+it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle,"
+when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing
+remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness,
+he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to
+him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad
+condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother
+him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the
+evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to
+assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, when the
+crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow,
+he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.
+
+The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud
+of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every
+day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit
+Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two
+calls at Roble--that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was
+smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful
+silence of his sarcastic tongue.
+
+This review of the week delighted Pellams. He hunted up Katharine the
+last afternoon and asked for a renewal of the contract.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"Are you sure you can help the extremes? You know the Quadrangle and the
+walks in the country--"
+
+"Listen to the Mocking Bird!" gurgled Pellams. He was feeling very well
+pleased with things in general.
+
+[Illustration: A STROLL IN THE MOONLIT QUAD, PLANNED TO INTEREST THE
+CROWD AT THE TUESDAY EVENING LECTURE.]
+
+"The product of the means is a bully good josh," he laughed, "and I'm
+not afraid of the product of the extremes; it's only equal to the same
+thing--now there's higher mathematics for you!" and Pellams danced the
+and she made him be serious and take up his work. The first quarter of
+an hour she called him to order twice--first for trying to trap with a
+lariat of grass an inquisitive gray lizard spying at them from a
+fence-rail; second, for enticing into conversation the huge Danish
+hound, whose bark is so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a
+pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever
+developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of
+impeccable behavior, Pellams whispered:
+
+"Say--"
+
+"Silence!"
+
+"Well, I'd like to have _some_ attention paid me. Call me down just to
+show that you're alive."
+
+She pointed to his History and subsided into her English Poets. When she
+came to earth again, the sun was low beyond the eucalyptus trees. There
+was a regular sound near her which she realized having heard for some
+time in her sub-consciousness. She peeped over the high-growing root
+between them. The man whom she was helping slept peacefully, his book
+closed and his mouth open, and only the suspicion of a snore stirring
+the quiet autumn air.
+
+"I shall never have any trouble with him!" thought Katharine, with just
+the faintest discontent, as she dropped a twig on his face, by way of
+waking him without embarrassment.
+
+The autumn rains came and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat
+under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind
+with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long
+exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams
+went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret
+joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had
+undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the
+term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his
+schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the
+three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers.
+Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the
+ocean of young life that swells around us." One day he threw out a
+direct allusion. Stopping in his remarks about chivalry, he sunk his
+voice to an impressive, confidential tone, looking almost directly at
+the impassive Pellams in the back row.
+
+"And I think sometimes," he said, "when I see the youth feeling the
+uplifting earnestness of first love--when I see it taking him gently by
+the hand and saying to him 'my son, there are higher things'; when I see
+him putting his spirit with new zeal to the tasks that are laid before
+him, when I see him realizing that life is indeed serious and its end
+the fulfilment"--and so on until the bell rang, while the subject of the
+eulogy, outwardly calm, grinned fiendishly in his secret soul, for only
+himself, the professor and one other knew that he had scored an A on his
+last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor
+himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine
+Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over
+him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English.
+
+Similar results ensued in French, which they prepared together, and he
+so endeared himself to the History professor that that worthy expanded
+to the point of a hint at an entrance to the seminary the next semester.
+The superior Miss Meiggs, pondering upon the remarkable change in her
+classmate, saw with concern this renegade disproving an argument with
+which she had enlivened many a Theta Gamma meeting. She never guessed
+with what patience Katharine was training his wandering attention. She
+was not present during the afternoons of real, quiet study which were
+forced out of him between luncheon and football practice.
+
+By the time their contract, renewed from week to week, had been
+operating for two months, Pellams began to wonder just where the point
+of the joke came in. People had become used to the condition. The House
+could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to
+Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They
+no longer had any new jokes on it. Jimmy Mason grumbled now and then
+because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and
+their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because _she_ wouldn't
+understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he
+might have taken an inequality of temper--as a flaw in character to be
+overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny
+to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he
+were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he
+could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A
+josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had
+seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it
+without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl
+wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh
+at all, where other people were concerned.
+
+When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no
+longer a josh where he himself was concerned. The realization of this
+quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below
+the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling
+among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his
+text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept
+repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever
+noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed
+back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could
+not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told
+him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why
+he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared
+to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she
+did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had
+guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly
+disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her
+suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl
+entirely without sentimentality--this was what he liked in her at first,
+and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his
+feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined
+in the beginning, she would shut her book with a slap and declare the
+compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed
+and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes,
+though they didn't know it. So he would put his chin in his hand and
+gaze at her as though the peculiarities of the Renaissance Poets were
+his greatest concern. He laughed, too, about the joke itself, finding a
+sort of painful relief in _double entendre_. Sometimes his mind
+wandered, and when Katharine failed to reprove him, as in the earlier
+days of the compact, he felt as though he had betrayed a confidence.
+Once they had forgotten all about football practice, and it frightened
+him; but she seemed not to have realized the gravity of the thing, and
+he laughed the alarming incident away. During lectures, he tried to
+reason himself out of the predicament. It was entirely possible that
+this feeling toward her was but another instance of habit, a natural
+affection for a chum, with some subtle influence of sex combining to
+frighten him into thinking it more serious. But he was not entirely
+comforted.
+
+Crises occur properly at the end of a semester. On the evening of
+Friday, the closing day, Roble gave an impromptu dance. Katharine made
+Pellams come; it would be final evidence in their joke, since he was
+known to dislike dances. He agreed to attend, adding his own emphasis to
+the reason as stated. Katharine filled out his card for him, allowing
+him three dances with herself. The evening began in misery for the
+woman-hater, and ended in perturbation of spirit. There were girls,
+oceans of them, and not one of them had any sense. Katharine was
+different. These girls didn't know when they were joshed, and they
+couldn't josh back. They were an uninteresting lot. She had filled his
+card with them and he had to hunt them up and dredge his head for
+conversation. It was an awful bore. Katharine was the only girl whom he
+had ever seemed able to talk with easily, and he had only three little
+dances with her. He was savage.
+
+During the third dance, he was floundering through an absent-minded
+conversation with a Freshman girl, whose eyelashes were pale pink, when
+Cap Smith glided past him, waltzing with Katharine. They looked as
+though they were having a very good time. Pellams felt that Cap, fine
+fellow as he was, generally grew too familiar with girls. He noticed
+with disapproval the man Katharine drew for the fourth dance, and she
+had Cap again for the fifth. He went over after that dance and asked for
+her program. Cap was down for two more dances. Pellams gave her back her
+card. He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped
+down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rage
+at Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain
+Thing.
+
+Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his
+table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent. He was
+deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the
+window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at
+the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has
+always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big
+room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever. It is the
+universal avenue after the lights are out, and the doors locked. You
+open the window as gently as you can and slide in. If the tenants are in
+bed, you get through into the hall on tiptoe, if possible; if awake, you
+stop and chat a bit by the way of courtesy; no one ever has to study in
+this enchanted bower. Moreover, if you do not live in the Hall, if you
+are an Alumnus visitor from town, if there are girls at your frat-house,
+or if you dwell off the campus and are belated, there are extra blankets
+under the lounge in the corner. Make up your own bed and turn in,
+without waking the sleepers. You are not crowding anybody. Once a whole
+baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably
+in the Knockery--but that is history.
+
+When Pellams slammed in and flopped disconsolately into a chair, Mason
+looked up, knowing that there was trouble somewhere.
+
+"What is it?" he asked. No answer. Jimmy rose, locked the door and
+closed the ventilator. Then he disposed himself on the lounge.
+
+"Tell your dad. Is it the girl?"
+
+Pellams's affirmative was put in language unrepeatable in a book for
+young persons.
+
+"Something gone wrong?"
+
+"Yes," _etc._
+
+Jimmy wished to offer consolation. "Can I do anything?"
+
+"Yes," growled the man in a dress suit. "You can give me a sweater and
+take me to Mayfield!"
+
+Now Jimmy was a true friend. He would have gone anywhere for Pellams.
+
+When the dance music at Roble had ceased, and the quiet of the December
+night was broken by only the patter of raindrops and the sound of
+singing in the Mayfield distance, punctuated by sharp whoops, Jimmy had
+got Pellams back to the Knockery pretty well consoled. It might not have
+made much difference just then, even if the lover could have known that
+over in darkened Roble, Katharine Graham, who did not approve of love
+affairs, lay crying herself to sleep.
+
+Pellams rose late next day, and ate his lunch mournfully at the House.
+He was in an exaggerated state of repentance and resolve. After
+luncheon he made a sorrowful pilgrimage to the Quad. Here he learned
+that he had lost five hours and that the Glee Club would tour the South
+without him.
+
+Chastened in spirit, he asked for Katharine at Roble. She had gone to
+Mrs. Stillwell's on the Row. He went again at night, calling late that
+she might have her packing finished for the morning steamer.
+
+By diplomacy, arranged beforehand with the door-girl, he got her
+downstairs. There was only a trace of reserve in her manner when she
+told him that she had all her packing yet to do, and that she couldn't
+walk about the Quad even once; there was more than a trace of
+embarrassment about him when he pleaded something very important.
+
+"Perhaps I know what it is," said she.
+
+"More than likely you don't," he persisted; "anyhow, I deserve a chance
+to explain."
+
+Katharine went down the steps with him.
+
+"Well?" she said, on the walk outside.
+
+"What do you think I want to say?" He was not so brave now.
+
+"The same thing that I have in my mind, that our little arrangement
+would better end. I have got my very first condition through wasting
+time on a foolish josh, and I don't believe you've been doing good work
+lately."
+
+"They gave me two of 'em."
+
+"Indeed? Then Florence Meiggs was right, wasn't she?"
+
+"Dead right."
+
+Silence for awhile, then she said: "But you mustn't blame me. I did my
+best, and if we both failed it's proof positive that it has to end."
+
+Another pause, with the whirr of distant machinery breaking the
+stillness. No speech on either side until Pellams felt that he must say
+something or the blood in his throat would choke him.
+
+"Do--don't you really know what I wanted you out here for?"
+
+"Perhaps to insult me further. Pellams!" impetuously, "why did you do
+it?"
+
+"What? flunk?"
+
+"No. Cut those dances."
+
+"You ought to know!"
+
+"Yes; I _do_ know, and your wanting to go to Mayfield was a good,
+gentlemanly excuse, and I ought to accept it, I suppose. Of course, it
+shouldn't make any difference to me; you have humiliated me enough
+already, but you might have considered the other girls."
+
+"Yes, and you are blaming me for cutting down there when you and Cap
+Smith were floating around----"
+
+"You will please leave Mr. Smith out of the conversation;" she turned
+toward the Hall. "I have to go in, the shades are down already."
+
+Pellams' courage came up with a flash. By blind instinct, he reached out
+and caught her hand. She did not struggle, though the moment he released
+his pressure she drew her hand away, and quickened her pace. He followed
+close, and she turned upon him.
+
+"This is what I might have expected when I cheapened myself with you!
+Will you let me go in?"
+
+"Not until I have said what I came to say; Katharine, can't you--can't
+you guess it? Oh, I know--Kathie, you _must_ have seen it--you know why
+I cut the dance--you know"--and again words failed him and he reached
+for her hand.
+
+But she put him off this time. "I am sorry to spoil such a beautiful
+piece of acting; but our arrangement is going to end, and this is a
+worn-out joke."
+
+They had come by now to the corner of Roble, where it is indiscreet to
+talk over private affairs, and neither said anything until they reached
+and mounted the steps into the shadow of the porch. Then she said:
+
+"After all, since it is over, I won't be unkind. Good-bye. We've had a
+pleasant semester, haven't we?" and this time she gave him her hand.
+
+A girl raised one of the hallway curtains just then. The sudden flash of
+light came upon Katharine where she stood with her hand in Pellams'.
+She had meant that look, that softening of the eyes, that little quiver
+of the mouth, for darkness and concealment, and he caught it all before
+she could blot it out with a smile.
+
+And, having argued to a conclusion, it mattered not to either that Miss
+Meiggs stood looking out at them with supreme contempt.
+
+
+
+
+AN ALUMNI DINNER.
+
+
+
+
+An Alumni Dinner.
+
+    "And it's we who have to rustle
+      In the cold, cold world!"
+
+
+Dr. Williamson's landlady would not listen any further. She stood on the
+threshold of her lodger's combination of bedroom and office and said,
+with an offensively clear enunciation:
+
+"You haven't any patients, and no more have I any longer, and I want
+that money to-morrow or I rent the room."
+
+The door closed.
+
+Williamson listened to her footsteps, as hard and uncompromising as her
+voice, and when they had ceased he got up from his chair, a despairing
+soul. After all, this was the rope's end. He would have to own up to a
+failure.
+
+If Williamson had been a man of more force he would not have
+acknowledged so much, perhaps; but he had been conscientious and
+faithful to the limit of his understanding, patient to the verge of
+philosophy, and the result discouraged him.
+
+He drew out his last clean collar and put it on, with the vague idea of
+going somewhere and doing something--what, he could not have told. His
+eyes fell on a framed document hanging near his mirror, a small but
+ornate instrument, setting forth that the Faculty and Trustees of the
+Leland Stanford Junior University, by virtue of the authority in them
+vested, etc., conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry on
+Philip Howard Williamson.
+
+His thoughts turned back toward a morning over four years gone, when he
+walked down the platform bearing that "last of his childhood's toys,"
+and in imagination P.H. Williamson, M. D., held conversation with Philip
+Howard Williamson, A. B.
+
+Williamson, A. B., standing just the other side of the mirror, spoke and
+said:
+
+"It looks as though you were up against it."
+
+Williamson, M. D., arranging his tie so as to hide his soiled shirt,
+answered:
+
+"I am up against it. And it's your fault."
+
+Williamson, A. B., did not seem to see it. But he was a conceited
+creature, anyway.
+
+"It's more than half your fault," went on the man on the real side of
+the mirror. "You dug and worked, and you thought that if you only kept
+ahead of your class in Physiology you had a clean card to success. How
+many fellows did you know in college?"
+
+"Some. I never went in for being popular. There were Trueman, and
+Miller, and Rodney--"
+
+"And how many of them were of the sort to help you? Trueman, without
+family or brains, and Miller, who lived in the East, and little Rod--"
+
+"They were the best I could meet. They were the only ones who understood
+that I really wanted people. No one understood how I loved the college
+and wanted to be in things. I wasn't good at telling; and besides, I had
+my work to do. They knew the way I used to look across the campus on
+Spring nights--"
+
+Williamson, M. D., checked him at this point. That impractical creature
+thought that they were talking of friendship, when it was only a
+question of Pull. He conveyed that point to the Bachelor.
+
+"Why didn't you find some friends who would be of use to Me?" he asked,
+savagely. "While you were following out sutures and involuntary
+reactions, what was Marshall doing? Running for class president and
+making the Mandolin Club and getting acquainted with people of some use
+to him. He isn't one-two-six with me for ability and never was; but he
+has patients to give away, and I--"
+
+Williamson, A. B., came to bat.
+
+"You do mightily well to reproach me with all this. How have _you_ done
+in making friends? Did you work up any connections at Columbia those
+three years? Have you tried to find anyone here in town? What friends
+have you except Stanford men? What have you done for yourself, anyway?"
+
+The other weakly quoted what the Head Demonstrator had said of his
+surgery.
+
+Williamson, A. B., held him to the point: "I also was called the keenest
+student of my time," said he; "but it isn't bringing you patients."
+
+The M. D. broke sullenly away, leaving the A. B. frowning back of the
+mirror. These dead selves are so crude! He ended the interview by
+slamming out of the house.
+
+For the twentieth time that week he cast up accounts with himself, as
+the electric car sped toward civilization. Assets, one dollar and five
+cents, just reduced by a grinding monopoly from a dollar-ten;
+liabilities, a laundry bill and six weeks' rent. Truly, a squalid
+failure. If he could only hold out a little longer! There was in sight a
+situation as consulting physician to a lodge in his father's Order,
+which would mean a living at least. He had the promise of it in a
+month's time. A loan of twenty-five dollars now would save him, but no
+good angel occurred to him, think as he might, and he had nothing he
+could afford to pawn.
+
+Troubled in spirit, he sauntered listlessly up Post street from Kearny.
+The mid-day rain had not yet dried from the pavements, and the air was
+clear and fresh. Against the last of a January sunset, the tops of the
+city were growing indistinct. The personnel of the crowd on the streets
+had changed; the promenaders and the cocktail-route procession had
+dwindled to a few stragglers. There was less of a press now, and most of
+the people were of the class that work until six, belated bookkeepers
+and girls from shops and sewing rooms. He watched these toilers with a
+vague feeling of envy; he dragged the feeling to the light and found
+that he was coveting the day's work just passed. What would not he have
+given to be tired at the end of a day of profitable toil? It was the
+hour when comfortable people sit down to dinner.
+
+In front of an art store he saw Lincoln, the _Chronicle_ man, idly
+studying the pictures. Williamson had known him as well as he had known
+any man at Palo Alto, but he walked by without a word, feeling in no
+mood for companionship. A few steps further he turned, and went back and
+stood behind his friend.
+
+"Hello, Phil!" said Lincoln, in cheery surprise. "Well, you are a
+stranger! Been keeping pretty close to your office, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes," answered Williamson, without going into particulars.
+
+"I haven't happened to get a detail out in your direction and my health
+has been unfortunately good, so I haven't seen you for moons, not since
+the night at the Zink, last Thanksgiving."
+
+"You newspaper men see more of the fellows than a man in my profession
+can hope to do," said the physician. "It isn't ethics for me to hunt
+them up, you know."
+
+"How is the practice, so far?"
+
+"Well," answered Williamson, hiding the bitterness of it with a laugh;
+"the practice is about all I have got out of it."
+
+"Not so bad as that, I'll bet," protested Lincoln. "Are you going down
+for Commencement, or the Ball, or anything?"
+
+"No, I shan't be able to get down," answered the other, turning in his
+fingers the lonely dollar in his pocket. "That's the worst of the
+medical profession," he added, equivocally.
+
+His thoughts came fast as they stood there in the fading daylight before
+the picture-shop. It was entirely probable that Lincoln would lend him
+the money he needed, and would lend it gladly. Their college friendship
+had been sincere, and a few years do not change a thing like that. He
+knew that the man had a good position on the _Chronicle_ and that he
+saved a large portion of his money--he had been economical at the
+University. Fortune could never smile upon Lincoln sufficiently to work
+any material change in his dress; he had always looked like a pauper;
+to-day, poverty showed in the journalist rather than in the
+carefully-dressed physician.
+
+Williamson's heart grew lighter. This Stanford man, rising before him in
+his hour of desperation, should tide him over his temporary trouble. Of
+all the men at the University there had been none who had spoken so
+often and so sincerely of the Stanford spirit as Lincoln. Here was a
+chance to put it to a test. He knew his man. Williamson felt himself
+filled with a faith in Divine Providence.
+
+But it was not easy to ask the loan. To suggest such a thing is less
+difficult to some people than to others. To Williamson it was anything
+but a simple thing. He could never broach the subject there on the
+sidewalk. The matter must be led up to in some way; to brace in cold
+blood was impossible. He moved his fingers in nervous irresolution, and
+the dollar touched them significantly.
+
+"Say, Lew, let's not stand here all night; come to dinner with me, can't
+you? We'll have a good Alumni chat; we don't bump into each other very
+often."
+
+He felt horribly hypocritical, yet this was the only way.
+
+"You haven't had dinner, have you?" he went on, when Lincoln hesitated a
+bit.
+
+"No. I'll be glad to, thank you, Phil. Where do you go?"
+
+"Let's try Sanguinetti's for the fun of the thing. We can talk down
+there, and it won't break us, either."
+
+They found a corner table in the restaurant. The room wore the quiet
+look of Monday evening, the calm that follows the storm of Sunday, when
+the place rocks with post-picnic revelry. A squat negro, perched on the
+edge of a serving-table by the wall, sang vociferously to a resonant
+banjo. Now and then a party of swarthy Latins joined in mildly when the
+selections incurred their favor.
+
+The two college men found it easy chatting. Williamson's dollar had
+brought a very good dinner, particularly the chicken and the tortillas;
+the claret was abundant and not half bad when jollied with seltzer. He
+was trusting to Lincoln for tobacco.
+
+Still the physician could not bring himself to the point toward which
+the dinner was intended to smooth the road. The "Dago red" had mellowed
+them both and they talked merrily of the days at Palo Alto, bringing up
+one good memory after another, drifting gradually to an exchange of
+Alumni personals of which the newspaper man furnished the larger part.
+They talked of the men their young University had sent into the distant
+parts of the world, youngsters running mines in the Antipodes, with fat
+salaries to keep up their courage; of the little Stanford colony in
+Western Australia and the Pioneers in China. There were a good many for
+so new a college. Then there were the commonplaces who were doing well
+at home. The thought of bringing the serious side of his own case into
+this chat gave Williamson a chill. It was a foolish bit of pride, but it
+was getting harder every minute to down it. He deftly turned the subject
+his way.
+
+"It isn't all prosperity, though. I've noticed that some of them seem to
+be up against it lately--just hard luck stories, I suppose. There's
+Rawdon, for example."
+
+Lincoln leaned back comfortably in his chair.
+
+"Let me tell you a case that has come under my notice lately and see
+what you think of it," he said. "I won't mention names, but it's about a
+man we both knew at College. He had a place on the paper, the
+_Chronicle_, and during the political season did very well; after that
+there came a slump and the city editor let him out; the other papers had
+no room for him, of course--they were dropping men--and he couldn't get
+a thing of any sort to do, though he rustled hard. You know Coles and
+Harrison, the boys call them the Stanford Employment Bureau, they have
+found quite a number of places for the fellows; but this particular man
+was evidently up against it, and there wasn't the smallest symptom of a
+job. He managed to get something in the Sunday supps, but barely enough
+to keep him alive, and nothing certain. Meanwhile he pawned his things
+gradually and grew pretty well discouraged. I remember I heard him say
+once, and his laugh covered more than I guessed at the time, that Jewish
+holidays ought to be prohibited by state law, since closed doors under
+the three balls meant some Stanford man's going hungry. He got down to
+bedrock and finally reached the point where he had gone without three
+successive meals. Pretty rough, wasn't it?"
+
+"I should say so," answered Williamson. His own distress was trivial
+beside a trouble like this.
+
+Lincoln fed the alcohol flame burning around the omelet just brought
+them.
+
+"It seems to me," he went on, "that there is a case in which a man is
+justified in asking help; he ought to ask it long before he gets to such
+a pass as that; if he lets his pride prevent him it's his own fault. We
+certainly have carried away from the University something of the spirit
+we learned there. I know for my part that such a man has a claim on
+whatever help I can give him, and as a Stanford man he has a right to
+seek it. Don't you agree with me?"
+
+Williamson had been waiting through the course of the dinner for a
+chance to advance an identical theory. He could not have hoped for a
+better opening.
+
+"Indeed I do," he said. "You have the old Stanford spirit as strong as
+ever, haven't you, Lew? Now I want to tell _you_ a story."
+
+At a table near them a woman who looked as though she had a history, one
+that dated far back at that, began to sing--one of those ballads about
+home and the wandering boy. The two men tipped back in their chairs and
+listened to the song. Williamson was planning what he should say as soon
+as it was ended. It would be better to tell the whole thing.
+
+During the applause that followed, Lincoln dropped his cigarette into
+his coffee cup and started to speak. Williamson, unwilling that another
+subject should follow the last words they had exchanged, interrupted
+him.
+
+"I have a story, too, Lew, and it's about myself. I don't doubt this is
+rather a surprise to you," he went on, noticing the look on the other's
+face, "although you know the way of the young physician is hard. The
+fact is, I have got to the point where I must get a little temporary
+lift or give up the struggle for a while, and I can't bear the thought
+of that."
+
+Then he went on swiftly, ignoring his friend's attempts at interruption,
+until he had told the whole story of his uphill work and his defeat.
+
+"You asked me just now, Lew, if I didn't think one Stanford man should
+help another who really needed help, if he could. I put up my last coin
+for an opportunity to ask you the same question, but with a different
+purpose."
+
+Lincoln's eyes were moist as he reached across the table and grasped
+Williamson's hand.
+
+"I think you know me well enough, old man, to know my answer to that
+question. But you did not let me finish my story. You see, I--er--I'm
+the man I was telling you about."
+
+
+
+
+BOGGS' ELECTION FEED.
+
+
+
+
+Boggs' Election Feed.
+
+    "Oh think what anxious moments pass between
+      The birth of plots and their last fatal periods!"
+
+                                        ADDISON.
+
+
+It would never have happened if Boggs hadn't dropped in on Jimmy Mason
+and Pellams when they were cramming for an examination, for, although
+Pellams had long "kept an axe" for Boggs, he needed the inspiration of
+the moment to swing it like this. It was always so with Pellams' best
+things.
+
+The inspiration in this case came one evening when he and Jimmy were
+doing genuine work. People who have seen it declare that the spectacle
+of Mason cramming for an examination was one of the show sights of the
+University. He generally let things go until the last day of grace; then
+with sundry fellow-victims and a motley collection of notes, syllabi,
+books, reports--anything on the subject--gathered on the green cloth of
+his table, he would start in. Raps might come from time to time on the
+locked door; Jimmy would hold up a warning finger for silence, while the
+outsider shot through the keyhole such remarks as "Jimmy Mason, loosen
+up. You've mixed my clothes again;" or, "Hi, Jimmy! give me the
+markings;" or, possibly, hurled a mass of unrepeatable terms at the
+unresponsive door. Perhaps his roommate, Marion, would come in when the
+lights went out; then Jimmy would call a breathing-spell, during which,
+while "Nosey" went to bed behind the portieres, he drew his lamp from
+its hiding-place and made strong coffee in the coffee-pot or
+chafing-dish, whichever had been washed the more recently. Somewhere in
+the small hours the seminary would adjourn with "international
+complications," "tendencies of the age," "sub-head B," heating their
+brains. Out of bed at seven for a final swift review of the subject,
+Mason would sail over to class with a great unbreakfasted hollow beneath
+his sweater, to pass freely and gloriously, and to forget the whole mess
+by the time he had finished his afternoon nap.
+
+And to see Jimmy in the seminary itself! How masterfully he kept track
+of headings, sub-headings and modifying circumstances! How he could
+scent at a day's distance the things which the professor was going to
+ask, as well as those he was going to skip! When he said, "Now, old
+Morton is heavy on this," the seminary digested the subject in all its
+bearings and ramifications; and when he said, "No use looking that up,"
+they skipped the heading, though pages of syllabi were slighted
+thereby. When the wandering mind of Pellams slid off the work, it was
+beautiful to see Jimmy lead it back with a word and a look; when he sent
+some sleepy Senior to bed with the remark, "You're no more good. Sleep
+it off and be fresh to-morrow," Jimmy touched the sublime.
+
+The glory of it all was that upper-classmen as well as Freshmen put
+themselves absolutely under the Sophomore's rule when it was a question
+of an examination. Thus does the elective system level all ranks and
+give genius opportunity.
+
+On the night that Boggs dropped in on them, Jimmy and Pellams were
+cramming alone. Two seniors who were usually in the group had gone
+somewhere to mix up in a complication over Student-Body treasurer. A
+Junior seldom out of line was a candidate for the Executive Committee;
+he had put his head in at the door to say, "Dead sorry, fellows, but
+can't get in it," and then gone down to Palo Alto to make himself
+agreeable to a dig girl who had "influence." The popularity of some
+people waxes strangely the latter part of April. A Freshman who was
+taking the course when he shouldn't and who stood on the dizzy brink of
+flunking it, had gone off with a Junior who wanted to stand well with
+certain Freshmen of importance, and who had overjoyed the youngster
+with an invitation to Mayfield, an event which made flunking clear out
+of the University a thing of small moment to the Freshman's mind.
+
+Pellams alone showed up. He was not in politics; further, he knew the
+value to himself of these evenings with Jimmy; not that the syllabi made
+much impression on him, but he carried enough to class next day to
+shadow forth an apparent knowledge of the subject. This he supplemented
+with two or three original reflections that interested the instructor
+and slipped him through. It was these flashes of intelligence that made
+him worth the labor to Mason. Sometimes he could set the whole seminary
+right on an obscure phrase; this made up for an hour of imperfect
+attention.
+
+To-night the two men were hard at it. They sat at opposite sides of the
+table, the electric drop-light illuminating the papers between them.
+
+"Say," said Pellams, "Bob Duncan's the luckiest baby in the bunch. He
+doesn't know as much about this course as I do, and he's got
+appendicitis, the doctor says--no fake."
+
+"Now, Pellams," said Mason seriously, "you have to remember Cromwell. He
+did all this in sub-headings four to eleven. You've placed him, haven't
+you?"
+
+"The guy that made them keep the powder dry?"
+
+"The _minister_ Cromwell; you remember _him_--the one who was bald."
+
+Jimmy had learned that Pellams needed a concrete peg on which to hang
+his memories.
+
+"Oh, sure, I've got him; that throw-away-ambition boy. Hadn't a hair
+between him and heaven."
+
+A knock came at the door.
+
+"That's it. Sh--sh!"
+
+"Let me in, Jimmy." The room was still.
+
+"I know you and Pellams are digging. I won't say a word to either of
+you, only give me a smoke."
+
+"Haven't any," said Jimmy, rapidly transferring a sack of Durham and a
+package of papers from the table.
+
+"Well, let me in, anyway. I want to read by your lamp. Oh, say, open
+up!"
+
+"It's Boggs. If we don't let him in he'll stand and plead in outer
+darkness all night."
+
+The door rattled. Jimmy howled "Ye-e-es!" in a tone of provoked
+affirmative, and Boggs was opened unto.
+
+It would be hard to tell in what way Boggs did not block the seminary.
+He found the tobacco by invading Jimmy's sacred drawer during an
+absorbing discussion on land tenure; then he rolled and consumed exactly
+fourteen cigarettes. Pellams kept count out of the corner of his eye.
+Boggs was making smoke in the sunshine of free tobacco. He put his feet
+on Mason's laundry packages, freshly stacked in the corner. He broke his
+word by talking politics steadily, and finally, when he drew out of the
+room just ahead of ten-thirty lights, a double sigh of relief went up
+from the crammers.
+
+"That article needs fixing," said Pellams, meditatively, as Jimmy got
+out the chafing-dish and prepared the black coffee that makes additional
+pages of syllabi possible before sleep comes.
+
+"I wonder," said Jimmy, "if he ever bought an ounce of tobacco since he
+came here. He's smoked mine every time he could find it since I've been
+in college. I remember," here Jimmy stopped to laugh, "that when I was a
+Freshmen--you'll bear witness I was a fresh one, too--I used to be
+pleased clear to the red at getting all that attention from an
+upper-classman. The satisfaction cost me a good many pounds of tobacco,
+though."
+
+"His opinion of himself politically is what kills me. Lyman is his
+ideal. He loafs in Frank's room until Frank has had to give up smoking.
+It's fun to see him. I was in there the other night. 'How are you going
+to stand on the election, Frank?' says Boggsie, as though it were a
+conference of the powers. 'Oh, I think Higgins is pretty good,' says
+Frank; 'what do you think?' Not that he gave a whoop; he was trying to
+be polite. 'Well, I may use my influence for Castleton,' says Boggsie,
+with his pet air of mystery. His influence consists of his roommate.
+'The deuce you will!' says Frank, with sarcasm. All wasted though, for
+Boggsie fairly chapped at the compliment of having surprised him. 'Yes,'
+said Boggs, 'that's what I like to see, the office seeking the man; you
+know, a fellow ought to wait and go about his business until people
+recognize him. I don't like to see a man going around with his hand out,
+raking the Freshmen in.' Then he looks around for applause and slopes
+out, smoking the last of Lyman's Durham."
+
+"He rake in the Freshmen! It would cost too much! Boggs wants the office
+to seek him, so as to save expense. When he was small I think he must
+have been the sort of kid that won't play his marbles for fear that
+he'll wear them out. He'd do anything mean to get office, but he won't
+spend money for it; he has enough, too; he doesn't have to pinch as he
+does, but he hates to spend a nickel when he can worm it out of other
+people. I'd love to get a feed out of him in some way; oh, it would
+taste good!"
+
+Pellams' ruddy face glowed fire-red with the dawn of an idea. His
+inspiration had come.
+
+"James Russell Lowell Mason, I'll bet you the price of--anything you
+name--that I can get a feed, a genuine,
+Mayfield-with-all-accompaniments, a Mayfield
+beer-beefsteak-Swiss-cheese-wine-and-song feed out of Boggsie!"
+
+The aroma of the coffee filled the room. Jimmy polished his stein and a
+tumbler and poured for the two of them.
+
+"But for my principle never to bet on a sure thing, I'd take you," he
+answered calmly. "You exclusive frat-men over on the Row" (Pellams was
+always loafing around the Hall) "haven't lived long enough with Boggsie
+to know him. He's a lobster, Pellams."
+
+But the fat Junior sat there with mirth shining from every line of his
+face, and drank his coffee; then he rolled on the floor in joyous
+delirium and beat Jimmy's rugs with an Indian club until the man
+overhead jumped out of bed and shouted uncultured things down the
+elevator.
+
+"Jimmy, darling!" cried he, waving a leg in the air for pure rapture,
+"Boggsie will treat, sure. We'll get him on his one big weakness; we'll
+play politics against pinching; you watch the office seek the man."
+
+"I don't--"
+
+"I do. Look here; to-morrow we nominate him. You have a mob on the back
+seats applauding like fiends, and I'll be the power behind the throne to
+such a campaign of blood, beer and boodle as you never saw, old
+Laundry-bags. We'll make Boggsie think he's ahead all the time; we can
+get him _some_ votes, you know; and then he's to go away election day
+for the sake of the proprieties. I telegraph to him, 'Elected by one
+vote. Feed!' We have the feed business all properly worked up by that
+time, of course; just sizzling in his brain, and when he gets off the
+train we'll meet him with a mob and a brass band, run him to Mayfield or
+Menlo, and there'll be a sound of revelry by night at his expense."
+
+The ruin of this particular cramming seminary was accomplished. The
+"coffee hours" were spent in a conference broken by smothered laughter,
+and by "Nosey" Marion's sleepy protests from behind the curtains.
+
+Next day, after Higgins and Castleton had been duly placed in
+nomination, Pellams rose from his seat in Chapel and nominated "Lorenzo
+Boggs, gentleman and student; a man who has let college politics alone,
+never having sought office from his fellow-students until now, when the
+office seeks him--Lorenzo Boggs for Student-Body president," amidst a
+storm of applause half ironical, half worked up by Jimmy Mason.
+
+Pellams flunked in the examination; his co-conspirator passed meagerly;
+but Pellams' heart lost little of its wonted buoyancy. This was about
+the last class of any kind he attended in the week between nomination
+and election. From the Row to the Hall and from the Hall to Palo Alto he
+moved with an energy rare to his rotund body. It was a new sensation,
+politics with a josh behind. He revelled in it.
+
+"We have to put up some show of constituents, you know," he said to
+Mason; "and, as Higgins and Castleton have no strings on me, I might as
+well help Boggsie out. Too bad my personal magnetism isn't being
+diffused for a more likely candidate."
+
+"Looks curious," said Jimmy, "the fight Boggs is putting up. Yesterday I
+struck the Women's Debating League; they won't vote for Higgins because
+they have been credibly informed--by the Castleton people, of
+course--that he's bad, and--"
+
+"You and I should have been nominated, St. James," interrupted Pellams,
+crossing his hands on his breast and looking at the gas fixture.
+
+"And they won't vote for Castleton because they have found out that when
+he fixed up the open meeting between his society and theirs he was only
+playing for votes."
+
+"Do you know that Boggs has a girl cousin in Palo Alto? He has worked
+her to whoop it up for him down there."
+
+"His literary society will go for him all right. They are tired of the
+way Castleton and Higgins have been waiting for the job to drop down
+like a ripe plum. Those two marks have worked the thing too long."
+
+"Jimmy, you don't mean that Boggs has any chance?"
+
+"Not a ghost. But we don't have to work up the whole thing; there'll be
+enough to make a decent showing and lend an air of truth to that
+telegram of ours. What have you done?"
+
+"Got the Rhos, anyway. We won't vote for anyone as a frat; the fellows
+hate Castleton on account of that Annual-board election last Christmas,
+and Higgins has thrown mud at us that we know of. I've about signed them
+all, except Duncan. Bob knew Higgins' wife's cousin in some dark corner
+of the country. Say, it's funny how tired people in general are getting
+of Higgins and Castleton and their gang politics. At Palo Alto yesterday
+I heard a crowd talking about it. 'Down with organized politics,' they
+said, and one of them who works in the laboratory with Boggsie said he
+was going to vote for modest merit."
+
+"Keep it going, Pellams, it won't hurt. Soothe his feelings beautifully
+after the banquet. I have it all fixed up to get him off the campus."
+
+Higgins' stock went down wonderfully in the next few days. Higgins, said
+the Castleton men, had pulled wires and worked combinations ever since
+he had been in the University. It hurts a College politician to have it
+known that he has been in politics. They pointed to his rather doubtful
+record as a member of the _Daily Palo Alto_ board. The sins of his
+Freshman days rose up against him when they touched on the fact that he
+had been elected class-president on a barb ticket, and had immediately
+gone over to the enemy in a fraternity house. Finally, to fill his cup,
+a Freshman, who had withstood fraternity blandishments for a year,
+glided through the hands of the Gamma Chi Taus, who fully believed they
+had him, and appeared on the very Sunday preceding election in all the
+glory of Higgins' frat pin. It was a bad slip; right there it cost
+fifteen Gamma Chi votes with a large girl following.
+
+"It isn't the swell girls that count for numbers, anyway," reflected the
+Higgins' supporters, wisely, and they turned to the cultivation of the
+dig girl who trails up the cinder paths mornings at eight, and who lives
+in the library during football practice. But the girl cousin of Boggs
+had been there to good purpose when they turned in that direction, and
+Roble only showed Castleton still ahead. Then a not over-scrupulous
+Junior in Higgins' trail started a story on Castleton, a tale calculated
+to put him in the same category, so far as being "bad" was concerned.
+Wednesday evening the anecdote reached Roble; a girl who had a brother
+heard it spreading at dinner, and by noon next day half the girls in
+Roble had their opinion of a crowd that would start such a malicious
+libel on Mr. Castleton "just to get votes." The Encina politicians did
+not know Roble girls for nothing.
+
+So it happened on Thursday that Pellams clumped breathlessly into
+Jimmy's room with a still wet copy of the _Daily_ and tragically pointed
+to the notice: "_Withdrawal_: I hereby withdraw from my candidacy for
+Student-Body presidency in favor of Lorenzo Boggs. Andrew Higgins."
+
+"Ye gods," gasped the Sophomore, "he can't win, Pellams, he can't!
+Castleton gets it sure. For heaven's sake, don't put the gang on to this
+until after to-morrow, though. I wouldn't have the double-cross worked
+on us for a cool ten credits."
+
+Fair dawned the day that was to float or to wreck so many little hopes.
+There are two periods of the year when the professor who has been young
+forgets the roll-call, and the one who never has been, remembers it. The
+first period comes in late November; the other is the morning of the
+Student-Body election.
+
+With consummate tact, Jimmy had come to an understanding with Boggs as
+to the propriety of his leaving the campus during the election.
+
+"You see, you stand a splendid show of getting it," he explained, "and
+the appropriate thing for you is to keep out of sight. When Pellams
+nominated you he made a point out of the fact that the office was
+seeking you; that has been a leading feature of the campaign, and it has
+won you lots of votes. You must not spoil the impression you have made
+for yourself and which we have emphasized all along. See?"
+
+Boggs saw, or thought he did, and went to town, ostensibly to carry out
+a commission for Pellams, but not before he had rallied some of his
+constituents and given them final instructions. It was wonderful to see
+what a variety of tastes and interests were represented. An older
+politician would have scented danger from the fact that so many of them
+had never come out into the arena before; but Jimmy only looked with
+smiling curiosity on the Ethics major or the Education "shark," dug up
+somewhere from their abstruse speculations.
+
+It was on their way to the station that Jimmy touched on the remaining
+issue of the campaign which he was managing.
+
+"You remember my speaking about a feed the other day? I ought to have
+spoken more fully, but I've been busy with other details."
+
+"Oh,"--began Boggs.
+
+"You know the custom," cut in the conspirator; "it will be expected of
+you if you get the office; it ought to come off to-night to be done
+properly."
+
+"That will all be attended to," said Boggs calmly.
+
+"You've seen about it?"
+
+"It's all fixed."
+
+"There'll be a lot of them; they will meet you at the train and you'll
+have to do it in shape. I can lend you a little."
+
+"Thanks, old man," said the victim, squeezing Mason's arm, "but just you
+leave that to me. It's all arranged to do the square thing by the people
+who have stood in with me. So long. Look out for me, won't you? I'll be
+down on the Flyer."
+
+When Jimmy got back to the Quadrangle there was a shifting mass about
+the polls. Encina politicians were there, Palo Alto politicians,
+serious-looking fellows from the Camp, and spruce ones from the Row.
+Castleton's followers stood in groups, looking smug and confident, while
+sour-faced Higgins people were revengefully putting in all their work
+for Boggs.
+
+Every election has its Mark Hanna; this time it was Jennie Brown, whom
+Pellams knew as "Boggsie's dig girl cousin." She was the silent spirit
+of the whole Boggs campaign. Mason, in telling the story of it
+afterward, said:
+
+"Pellams and I were there when the polls opened. That girl was on hand,
+too, with a gang of Palo Alto girls all ready to start things for
+Boggsie. Well, you ought to have seen her. Heaven help us and our
+masculine schemes if they get women suffrage and the Brown lives. At
+ten-thirty in the first rush she steered a whole Education class, worked
+them beautifully past Castleton's hungry heelers, right up to the
+ballot-box. _She_ wasn't working combinations; it cut no ice with her
+how they voted for managers, and treasurers and editors, so long as they
+were solid for Lorenzo Boggs.
+
+[Illustration: ... THEN A LULL DURING CLASS.]
+
+"I numbered them off as they voted, and I could see that things were
+going darkly and suspiciously for our friend the Lobster. 'What do you
+think of it?' says Pellams. He was getting excited. 'We didn't know our
+power, did we? Look at the votes he's rolling up. Say, we're corkers and
+never knew it!' A few classes from the respectable part of the Quad,
+where they do Political Science, came drifting along then with votes for
+Castleton, and it went Castleton for awhile; then a lull during
+class, followed by a scattering vote for Boggs. It was about an even
+thing during eleven-thirty break, with Castleton still ahead. The frat
+votes fell in bunches in the biggest rush at noon; I could catch old
+Boggsie's name marked on most of them, but Castleton was full fifty to
+the good then. I bolted lunch with Pellams at his house and came back to
+the Quad. Things were beginning to happen. People I never heard of, the
+kind of bird that floats in and out on the train and probably doesn't
+know there is a Student-Body with troubles of its own; digs, crawling
+out into the light, blinking away at the line; Laboratory fiends in
+squads, actually losing twenty minutes of precious credit,--the darndest
+crowd of resurrected stiffs the Quad ever saw, strung out from the
+registrar's office to the polls, every last one of them squeezing a
+ballot properly marked ahead, all looking as if it were a conferring of
+degrees, serious as hell, you know, and the eye of the Brown girl or of
+one of her crowd fastened on each of them. Poor Castleton, he was a
+goner! His heelers got up against this line of sphinxes and fell back,
+done up. It was two o'clock and after; still the vote rolled up. At
+two-thirty they closed shop, and Pellams and I fell on each other's
+chests behind a pillar, and busted at the josh on ourselves.
+
+"Then we went over to get the figures of our triumph. 'Boggs, 402;
+Castleton, 375,' and the biggest vote in the history of the office.
+Well, you bet we went down to the train! Couldn't freeze _us_ out! We
+were going to pry open the Lobster's claws and use them for a corkscrew.
+So we piled into a 'bus. But, honest, we were paralyzed.
+
+"Down at the station was the conquering Brown with her people, all
+watching for the train. Say, when Boggsie saw the whole gang of us, he
+was a balloon. He got up on a truck and made us a speech of thanks.
+Pellams and I yelled 'Hear, Hear,' right along. Oh, it was awful! He
+gave us the whole history of the Student-Body from the days of
+'Ninety-one up. Finally Pellams couldn't stand it any longer and called
+out, 'Good boy, Boggsie. How about that feed?' and Boggsie waved his
+hand like a Tuesday evening spieler and said, 'I have provided for that,
+ladies and gentlemen. Miss Brown, my cousin, invites you all down to her
+home in Palo Alto for a little refreshment. Everyone is welcome.'
+
+"I had to pick my fat friend up. Boggsie's getting out of the whole
+thing without spending a bean knocked him cold. But he got his wind
+later. You ought to have heard his speech down there at the house, with
+a plate of melted strawberry muck in one hand and a glass of sour in the
+other, replying to Boggsie's vote of thanks to us two, and skinning his
+face at the Brown girl. Oh, it was a peach!"
+
+
+
+
+IN THE DARK DAYS.
+
+
+
+
+In the Dark Days.
+
+
+    "Mrs. Leland Stanford has decided to sell her jewels to keep
+    open the doors of the University."
+
+    ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTS, 1896.
+
+
+Bonita, mother of racers, stood just beyond the shadow of an oak tree,
+leisurely cropping the new pasture grass. Occasionally, she lifted her
+head toward the red roofs of the University buildings as though she
+expected somebody. The chimney sent up a stripe of black against patches
+of cloud and sky, and the even hum of the shops came across the pasture
+with a distinctness born of the motionless Spring air. Bonita, putting
+her pointed ears forward, could catch the upper notes of the chorus,
+rehearsing in the Chapel.
+
+Such a day as this should bring Craig into the pastures. He could lean
+on the fence and pull at his pipe to his heart's content. The brood-mare
+did not fancy the smoke, but she liked to have him talk to her. There
+were a number of interests they had in common; the smell of the new
+grass, the tempting silver-green of willows budding along the lake
+beyond the fence, delighted him, too, while Bonita herself was deeply
+interested in his University.
+
+She could remember perfectly the days when the ranch spread undisturbed
+from her paddock in the stockfarm yard to the deep shadows of the
+Arboretum. Then she was only a colt, to be sure; but the world beyond
+the paddock fence interested her. The grooms in the yard were not more
+sorry than she herself that the last colt from a famous sire should be a
+filly with an imperfect ankle-joint. When they took the other colts out
+of the paddock to put them through their morning lessons around the
+little ring in the kindergarten, she wished mightily to follow. She
+turned about the corral at a good speed to show them that she had the
+proper spirit of her blood, but they always shut the red gate too soon
+and the others went on up the road impudently flicking their fuzzy tails
+at her.
+
+A gray-bearded man with kindly eyes, whom they called the "Governor,"
+used to drive up under the blossoming eucalyptus trees every now and
+then; he stopped one day by her paddock and came to look at her. Bonita
+liked him at once, and she paid him the most delicate attention she knew
+by trying to eat his clothes. The Governor laughed as he put her off,
+and said that it was too bad about her ankle. Then he drove over to
+watch the kindergarten learn the alphabet of race-winning.
+
+Later, she watched her fellows go lightly down the road to the stock car
+and rumble away over the track to the main line and on to the great
+world where men put trust in them and sent them back to the Farm with
+newspaper clippings and horseshoe wreaths made of immortelles with the
+figure 2-and-a-fraction in the middle.
+
+When she was grown and they had put her out in a side pasture, there
+were some new stables there, with a lot of men thronging round them who
+did not look like grooms. The knowledge that something of importance to
+the world was about to happen the other side of the fence made her feel
+more contented. If she could not travel in a box car to see such things,
+it was good to have some of the excitement of it brought in to the
+ranch.
+
+At first she did not notice much, being deeply interested just then in
+the early education of Fenelon, 2.10-1/4, who was a fretful infant and
+took up most of her time. When he had passed out of her immediate care
+and was cropping sweet alfalfa with the rest, she watched curiously the
+foundations sinking into the grass, the crowd of people who came one May
+morning to hear things said round a block of yellow sandstone, the
+fitting of the red tiling above the stone walls. By this time she knew
+the reason of it all; the dead heir, the monument, the boys and girls
+who were coming to be taught in this great kindergarten. Finally, when
+these had poured into the place, some of them straggled out into the
+pasture and made friends with her. From them she learned more definitely
+the great things that had been done and were about to happen; they told
+her of the wonderful endowment, of the strangers from corners of the
+world never reached even by the lucky horses who had rolled away in the
+box cars, of the numberless buildings that were to surround and dwarf
+the structures she had seen grow up in the sun.
+
+"The Governor" had driven less often through the yard since the yellow
+buildings were up, and the boys and girls playing among them. After
+awhile he ceased to come altogether. Then Bonita, the brood-mare,
+understood that something had happened. It was more quiet everywhere
+after this. Most of the horses and mares, her colts among them, went off
+in the cars, not to come back, they told her. She stood under the dark
+oaks for hours at a time, fearing lest they would send her, too. Her
+longing for the world was past now; she wished to be left in the quiet
+pastures with the students to talk to.
+
+It was during these days that Craig, who taught something to the younger
+people, used to lean on the fence and smoke during the afternoons. He
+was not much older than many of the students she knew, and she liked
+him particularly. He had lumps of something white and sweet, and he
+rubbed her head in exactly the right spot. When she had won his
+confidence, he told her many things about himself and the College. Once
+he had been at another place, a college older than this by a long time
+but not so famous. The Overseer of this one had written him to come and
+teach there, at a better salary. He explained to her what this
+meant--money for the support of his mother, and in a few years the study
+in Europe of which he dreamed, and for which he worked and saved, and
+beside this the growing up with a new university, from an instructorship
+in the present to a full professorship in the wonderful future. He told
+her what was promised him, and showed her a picture once of the plan of
+the completed university, with its arch and chapel tower and the great
+mechanical shops spreading back across her shady pasture to the borders
+of the lake.
+
+Then she learned what the death of "the Governor" had brought upon them;
+why the horses had been sold and why there were no more hammers nor
+chisels ringing against the stone. The farm was losing a thousand
+dollars a day, and the Government had seized upon the money they were
+building the monument with and was trying to wrest it entirely from the
+woman who had stopped once to pet the brood-mare when "the Governor"
+was driving in the yard. These things were hard to understand. There
+had never been any question of money here that Bonita could remember.
+
+One day she had nosed vainly for the sugar he used to bring; Craig told
+her that for two months he had had no money to give his mother; that if
+it wasn't for a grocer in Mayfield who was kind to people in trouble,
+they would have had nothing to eat. Bonita, remembering the students she
+had seen gathering mushrooms, suggested grass; but he told her,
+laughing, that only one man to his knowledge had ever lived that way and
+he was a king, long ago, in the holy times. He, Craig, would have to
+have money. In an old vest he had worn in the East, his mother found a
+few pennies and had walked to Palo Alto and spent them for stamps for
+the sake of paying for something. After this explanation, Bonita did not
+hunt for sugar.
+
+Although things grew easier after a time, Craig was gloomy enough during
+the afternoons when they talked across the fence. Once "the Governor's
+Wife" had been given five hundred dollars to pay her servants, and she
+had given it to the Overseer for his teachers. But the Overseer had
+begun at the houses where there were the most children, and he had not
+got around to Craig, who had only a mother. When temptation came to
+him, he told Bonita about it and asked her advice. A letter had come to
+him with an offer from his old college; it meant a full salary and the
+hope of Europe. It was everything to him, he said, but he couldn't bear
+to go away. The brood-mare had put her nose affectionately against his
+arm. She understood little about the salary, but she knew how dreadful
+it would be to leave the pasture. The man must have understood, for
+after being quiet a long time and smoking harder than ever, he said that
+he was going to stay. But many times after that, when other offers came,
+he told her how hard it was to decide and how black everything looked
+for the University. The Government was pulling at the fund, and the lady
+who was building the monument was going to sell her precious things to
+get money.
+
+The last time Craig leaned on the fence and whistled to her, he had been
+very unhappy. Since then Bonita had not seen him. She was afraid that
+he, too, had gone, after all, as the horses and grooms had gone, without
+even a good-bye. She felt that if he had finally decided to give it up,
+the smoke must fade away above the top of the chimney and the voices
+cease altogether.
+
+But to-day, when the clouds were breaking and the clear blue of
+summer-time looked down between them, the chimney-smoke was blacker than
+ever and across by the lake fence some young people were pulling
+mushrooms and laughing. Bonita looked over toward the buildings. Then
+she cropped grass again, for only a gurgling meadow-lark broke the line
+of the fence-rail.
+
+Suddenly she heard Craig's low whistle. He had come out from the
+Wood-shop and put his elbows on the fence, his pipe sending up clear,
+white smoke. Stopping now and then for a blade of grass, to show that
+she was not too eager, the brood-mare walked slowly up to him. He was
+not happy, as she had expected to find him. His brow was puckered and
+his lips shut tightly on the stem of his pipe. Bonita put her nose over
+the fence. The instructor took his pipe from his mouth and rubbed her
+cheek slowly with the back of his knuckles.
+
+"Well, old girl," he said, "I'm afraid you and I won't have many more
+talks over this fence."
+
+The brood-mare looked at him with questioning eyes.
+
+"I plead guilty," he went on, "I oughtn't to have kept the secret from
+you, I know. The minute I got the letter I should have come out to tell
+you about it, but it was raining; honestly, it was."
+
+He gave her a lump of sugar by way of conciliation.
+
+"You see, I couldn't resist this one," he continued, while the sugar
+crunched under her teeth; "it's a big honor and three thousand a year,
+and I've got to do something; now, haven't I?"
+
+His tone was doubtful, as though he were hardly sure of her opinion. The
+meadow-lark which he had disturbed was releasing the joy of its full
+throat under a shaft of sunlight further down the fence. The air hung
+over them, sweet with the fragrance of the freshened pasture, charged
+with the mysterious power of a Santa Clara Spring. No man, or horse, who
+has caught that smell, ever forgets the valley of the Saint. Bonita was
+looking across the green to the mushroom gatherers.
+
+Craig spoke, a little petulantly.
+
+"You never agree with me about my going, anyway. You seem to think that
+the beauty of this campus and the freedom of everything here is argument
+enough. But it's all too uncertain. I've told you that my salary is cut
+away down and I'm not any too sure of ever having it made up to me; as
+it is, we assistants are here only because the heads decided to cut
+their own pay and keep us for the sake of the departments. If the suit
+is lost, it's good-bye, anyway. I can't believe you have much idea that
+we're going to win it to-morrow. It went for us in the lower courts,
+here in California, but do you think that the Supreme Court of these
+selfish and United States is going to decide for us just because they
+were gallant enough to Mrs. Stanford to hurry the case up in the
+calendar and cut short her suspense? You don't understand things, if you
+think so. Out here where you live, the rains may be late and the grass
+seem never coming, but you know it'll rain sooner or later, and you're
+getting hay right along and it doesn't take much water to bring up what
+you want. But with me it's different. We're going to get a weather
+prediction from Washington to-morrow that'll tell us definitely whether
+it's to be winter for keeps around here or summer and a good crop."
+
+The instructor leaned on the fence and puffed on at his pipe. Bonita
+endured the smoke that clung around them in the still air, for she felt
+that they were at a crisis. She drew up closer to the rails and put her
+head against the instructor's shoulder. Suddenly, the man let his pipe
+fall into the grass and he laid his face against her soft, gray nose.
+
+"You're a good old girl," he said, "and you know more about it than
+anyone. But you haven't any money question to worry you. You don't love
+the place a bit more than I do; you don't love it as much, because you
+only know the nature side of it, and I know the bigness of the rest of
+it, too. But the hope's almost dead, old lady; I can't tie my ambitions
+to a corpse, you wouldn't ask me to, and you know I'm not the only one
+to be looked after. But, oh, it'll be hard to go, won't it! There's
+something that grips you where you live--you understand it."
+
+The brood-mare did not pull away, although he was holding her head
+tightly in his hot hands.
+
+"If it all goes smash to-morrow and I can ever raise the money, I'm
+going to send back for you, my beauty. You're getting too old to bring
+much now, and you'll have to go sure if the Government wins."
+
+Bonita lifted her head suddenly. A drop of cold rain had fallen against
+her face. The clouds had drawn together sulkily above them. Across the
+intervening turf hastened the mushroom gatherers, their baskets full of
+the brown and white trophies. Craig picked up his pipe.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, with a caress. "I'll come over to-morrow and tell
+you the final news."
+
+Bonita had never shown him how much she really cared, true to her
+feminine reserve; but to-day, leaning her slender neck far over the
+fence, she whinnied after him until he stopped at the corner of the
+Power-house and waved back to her. Then she cropped grass slowly while
+it began to sprinkle.
+
+Next morning, when the second hour was about half through, a feeling of
+excitement filled the Quad and penetrated the classrooms. Craig's
+students were not paying very creditable attention to his lecture. He
+himself was keeping his mind on the syllabus with considerable
+difficulty. When someone passed the window and the eyes of the entire
+class, including even the enthusiastic dig on the front seat, were
+turned that way, Craig let his own wander and hesitated the least bit in
+his talk.
+
+All at once, like a thunderclap, a half-dozen voices somewhere in the
+Quad gave the yell. Craig stopped speaking and looked at the class, who
+gazed back at him. A man with his back to the windows stood up and
+looked out. The seats creaked ominously. Then, like grass after a
+breeze, the whole class rose and craned necks at the window.
+
+The instructor, coming to himself, began feebly:
+
+"If you please--"
+
+Again the yell, not the desperate cry that is wrung out to cheer a
+losing team, but the voice of victory, of joy and of great relief.
+
+Professor Craig went out of his classroom like a shot, the class after
+him.
+
+There was a triumphal parade to the station, with flags and the entire
+population of Roble beating time with dust-pans and brooms, to meet the
+President who had sent the happy telegram. There were songs and speeches
+and demonstrations in front of Xasmin House, with fellows hugging each
+other or swinging round in side-line fashion, girls crying, and the
+President's parrot incidentally learning the yell. Then, at night, the
+alumni poured in on the trains from north and south, stirring the tumult
+anew. Gay lanterns jewelled the porches of the Row, the Gym blazed with
+light for more speeches and football songs, with no thought of football
+in the singing of them, and round and round the shadowy Quad, where the
+yell flashed in electric letters, went a wild carnival procession of men
+and women, with torches and noise-machines, and Instructor Craig at
+their head.
+
+The gleam of the unusual lights, the happy shouts, and the clamor of
+firecrackers, came in mingled confusion across to the dark pasture where
+Bonita stood by the fence with her head raised and her pointed ears
+forward. Craig had not come that afternoon to tell her the final truth;
+but, listening and watching from the shadow, she did not feel that he
+had gone away.
+
+When she did see him again, he wore a new suit and, what was more
+important, its pockets bulged with sugar. She was very glad to see him,
+of course, but her greeting was an indifferent one after all; for she
+was preoccupied, just then, with the infant needs of Pronto 2:17-3/4,
+and could not stop to interest herself in the fact that the youngest of
+the universities had been saved for all time.
+
+
+
+
+CROSSROADS.
+
+
+
+
+Crossroads.
+
+    "Oh see ye not yon narrow road
+      So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
+    That is the Path of Righteousness,
+      Though after it but few inquires.
+
+    "And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
+      That lies across the lily leven?
+    That is the Path of Wickedness,
+      Though some call that the road to Heaven."
+
+        THOMAS THE RHYMER.
+
+
+I.
+
+The regular after-dinner crowd was smoking in Frank Lyman's Encina
+boudoir, lolling over his sofa, their feet on his table, their legs
+tangled on his iron bedstead. The steam heat was coming "Clank! clank!"
+into the radiators, for it was a cold, clear evening in the time between
+rains. Outside the fog was thick upon the hills, sending gray
+ghost-fingers over toward the valley. You could lean from the window and
+smell its clean moisture, mingling with the scent of young plants in the
+fresh-turned earth. Frank himself sat close to the window and looked out
+toward the gymnasium, because he had discovered a new amusement. There
+was a section of the board walk between Encina and the gym which was
+flooded just to its top by a pool from the late rain, so that if you
+stepped heavily thereon the plank gave a bit and dropped you into the
+water. The diversion consisted in betting with "Pegasus" Langdon on the
+style of crossing adopted by chance wayfarers. The stakes were five
+cents a corner. Frank backed the class who took the thing at one bound;
+"Peg" laid his coin on those who went over on their tiptoes, trying not
+to spring the plank into the water. For every one who did neither, but
+walked around the puddle, five cents a corner went into the tobacco
+fund. It was just as good as matching nickels and involved less
+exertion.
+
+There is a theory in the Hall that you can tell a man's habits by the
+rooms he occupies there. The nearer he gets to the corner fronting on
+the baseball field, the more sociable is his nature. Those who hold the
+rooms at that corner or on the second or third floors, so as to be in
+easy hail of anyone coming in at the back entrance, are Public
+Characters. Their apartments are reception rooms in very truth. It has
+never been explained why Encina does not sag at that end, like an
+excursion steamer on the side toward a boat race. If, on the other hand,
+you believe you have a Mission, or if you are a Dig, rooming in the Hall
+because it is convenient to the Quad, then you dwell in "Faculty Row,"
+away off to the east, where the early sun pulls you out in time to put
+the finishing touches to your Latin, and where there is no trafficking
+to and from the Quad to disturb your evening study.
+
+It was said that Frank Lyman was the only man at the Quadrangle end of
+the Hall who ever made much pretense of studying. By the same token the
+keepers of the college tradition alleged that he alone of all the gang
+stood high in the opinion of the Faculty. It was a way he had. He stood
+well with everybody.
+
+If they had taken the trouble to investigate, those who wondered at his
+ability both to loaf much and to study much, at his scholarship dwelling
+alongside of his popularity, they might have found that he kept the two
+things in harmony by a marvelous system. The gang dwelt in his room,
+made it their hang-out, but only just so long; when the hour arrived for
+Lyman's study-time, they vanished away mysteriously, took the hint
+conveyed in some fashion, no one ever knew how, and were gone.
+
+To the under-classmen, Lyman was an object of healthy awe. Older than
+the average senior, he had been already in the larger world. His opinion
+of things had especial value even in his Junior year. After the football
+season, when he had been acknowledged the keenest manager the college
+had ever found, the under-classmen had a blind faith in his
+infallibility. The older students relied on him in much the same way,
+though there were some who said that self lay at the bottom of Lyman's
+system of morals, that the watchword of his philosophy was "Does it
+pay?" These men were sentimentalists who had ideals. Langdon, the
+Sequoia editor, would have told you that he thought more of Lyman than
+of any two men in the class; it is a question, though, whether he would
+have recommended Lyman's advice in everything. Frank was a good man to
+keep a Freshman's money for him, to listen to his class-room troubles or
+to stand between the luckless youngster and Faculty wrath; but when it
+was a case into which something deeper entered, perhaps the Senior's
+worldly philosophy was not of the best sort. This was the idea of
+dreamers like "Pegasus" Langdon, who said things about "sentiment" and
+to whom Freshmen seldom came for advice. But Lyman continued to hold his
+after-dinner receptions, and his admirers piled themselves comfortably
+on his bed and believed in him implicitly.
+
+The psychological moment came for the regular withdrawal. Frank opened
+his windows with care, donned the old bath-robe which was his armor for
+the battle intellectual, put on his eye-shade over his straight brown
+hair, and opened his Pollock. At this hint the others slipped out; only
+Jimmie Mason lingered, his gaze on the shadowy hills with their faint
+fringe of dark green, the dregs of his pipe purring in the stillness.
+Lyman's room-mate was somewhere queening. Lyman himself, pretending to
+study, looked up from time to time, waiting for the Sophomore to unbosom
+himself. Frank knew the symptoms.
+
+"Well, Jimmie?" he said at length--one couldn't study with that going on
+and Frank had his stint to finish.
+
+"It's about my father."
+
+"Drinking again?"
+
+Jimmie only nodded. The smoke went out in his pipe; he knocked the ashes
+from it and put it away mechanically in the common pipe-rack over the
+radiator.
+
+"Tell me about it." Frank had closed his book, and was leaning back in
+his tilted chair, his feet braced in the shelf beneath, his hands
+clasped over his knees.
+
+"Not much to tell, I guess, no more than you know already. I got a
+letter from the old lady."
+
+"Your grandmother, eh?"
+
+"Yes. She says something must be done. 'In low saloons,' she says, and
+I've been sizing it up--and Frank, don't you think I ought to go home?"
+
+A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table
+between them.
+
+It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it
+in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out
+his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.
+
+"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?"
+
+"Not much. We've always been poor, you know."
+
+"Because he drank?"
+
+"Yes, he never could keep a job but so long."
+
+"Not even when you were small?"
+
+"I wasn't with him then. When my mother got--when she left him, she took
+me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I
+lived with him until I came here."
+
+"Are you very fond of him?"
+
+"No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or
+for me, to make me."
+
+"I don't see why you lived with him then."
+
+"He'd behave himself better. I had a sort of influence over him. He was
+afraid of me, or ashamed, or something, and I stuck to him to keep him
+straight. But, oh! I hated it, and when he got going all right, I cut
+loose and came here."
+
+"What sort is the old lady? W. C. T. U. and all that kind of thing, I
+suppose?"
+
+"Something on that order."
+
+The Oracle leaned forward until his chest came almost between his bent
+knees, as was his wont when he clinched his arguments.
+
+"I suppose you've never figured it out that people of her way of
+thinking would call what little drinking you do at Mayfield 'drinking in
+low saloons?'"
+
+By his silence Jimmie admitted that there was something in the position.
+Frank followed up his lead.
+
+"So it may be nothing very bad after all. But let's suppose it is;
+suppose he has slid back into the worst of his old ways, is it going to
+pay to go on and break things all up for yourself, for the purpose of
+trying to bolster him up? It seems to me you would let your enthusiasm
+get away with your common sense. But it's your business, Jimmie. Only
+the thing that gets me is the blooming uselessness of it all. What can
+you do?"
+
+"I can work."
+
+"You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right
+before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his
+sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked
+man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down
+into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after
+sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't
+cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is
+drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him
+just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on
+his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had
+begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was
+to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank
+showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.
+
+"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of
+yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I
+don't understand."
+
+"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample,
+when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.
+
+"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a
+fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait.
+You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your
+chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long,
+and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be
+sense in it; there isn't now.--"
+
+Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was
+not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had
+not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his
+thoughts on his unfinished work, said:
+
+"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.
+
+The fog had not yet come into the valley when the Sophomore opened the
+window, down in his own room; it was reaching out, still driven before a
+lazy wind. Indistinctly the singing of the Glee Club, rolling home from
+practice in the Quad, came through the damp twilight. Jimmie had been
+with them on the Christmas trip, tasting a social life he had known
+nothing of till then. Now they were going to run him for leader next
+year. He sat on his window ledge listening. The side of the Hall
+stretched away from him, four tiers of light where the fellows were at
+work or were bumming away the week-night. Through the opened windows
+came the low tone of many conversations, stirred now and then by a
+"rough-house" note. A coyote barked somewhere among the hills, a
+reminder of the nearness of our higher life to the life universal.
+Jimmie took a long, deep breath of the moist air, as though he would
+draw it all, all unto himself. This was his life, he had made it for
+himself, and he loved it, he loved it! He had no part any longer with
+what had come before it. All these were in shadow, the people and things
+of his bitter childhood. The fellows up there in the lighted rooms had
+homes somewhere; there was a feed-box being opened even then, perhaps,
+at some study table; they were thinking of vacation, most of them, and
+of other places. But this was home to Mason, this wide, soft campus,
+with the sandstone arching over it and bounded by shaggy hills, the only
+place he could call his own. Most of the laughing people who lived here
+with him were in a dream from which some Commencement Day would wake
+them. To Mason it was reality. Yes, Frank Lyman was right. Jimmie was
+glad he had asked him. The idea of going away had been a thoughtless
+impulse, an immature judgment. He would stay--for the two years.
+
+He took off his coat and opened a book under the lamp; but a face came
+and settled between him and the page, a bloated face with irresolute
+lips that would not move from the black and white before him, but
+flickered there and mocked him, until finally he closed the book, and,
+without looking out again on the campus, turned into bed.
+
+
+II.
+
+It was a quiet night outside. The last spring rain was over; the dry,
+deadening California summer had begun its advance on the land. Already,
+the green of the hills had faded into a lighter hue, a forerunner of a
+yellow June and a brown July. The campus was astir with the movement of
+a Friday night. Shadowy figures, in couples, came and passed down the
+fairy-land vistas of the Quadrangle; the 'busses deposited the élite of
+Palo Alto at the door of the Alpha Nus who had said that they would be
+at home; noises of all kinds, from not unmusical singing to plainly
+unmusical whoops, exhaled from every pore of the Hall. The piano on the
+lobby was groaning out a waltz from its few attuned keys and the little
+space between the big rug and the rail overlooking the dining-room was
+packed with forms in various conditions of negligée, dancing earnestly
+and painfully.
+
+Only one room, and that generally the center of disturbance, "sported
+the oak." Jimmie Mason sat in the knockery, with a book cocked up in
+front of him, and made a pretense of studying, but his thoughts
+wandered. Finally he threw his work aside altogether, and looked at the
+little patches of starlight visible between the branches of the tree
+outside. It was so plain, the thing he ought to do, in justice to
+himself, that he had thought the dream of the other thing a fancy that
+had passed and had been put away with the notions of his prep-days. And
+yet he had found no peace in his new decision. His plans for next year,
+his work in class, his new success with certain ventures which after two
+years of the hardest, closest pinching, had put within his reach the
+means to gratify a few little whims, to indulge in a few things his
+poverty had hitherto forbidden him--a few common things the men around
+him enjoyed, and the lack of which he had ever concealed even from
+himself--all these were made footless by the ache in the bottom of his
+soul. And, as he sat and pondered on it, a hard, dull resentment which
+he had hitherto kept down by sheer will power rose above his other
+thoughts and claimed admission as a reality. His father had no right to
+do this thing to him. He was an old man; his chance was past, given up
+for a few barrels, more or less, of distilled spirits. It was for this
+that the something inside was asking him to forfeit the chance he had
+made for himself. The University was his home. His father had done
+nothing toward this. The laundry agency had provided a living, and the
+broad democracy of the college had done the rest for him. He was one of
+the "prominent men" now, a somebody, as he had never been and never
+could be in the travesty of home that had been his father's giving. Upon
+his life here rested the possibilities of the future toward which he
+looked dreamingly sometimes when his notes were written up, and the
+laundry accounts checked. Assuredly, his father had no claim on this; to
+admit it would be an injustice to himself, to his ambition, and to his
+work. And yet this face which had come between him and his book the
+first night the fight had been on must haunt him always in the hour when
+his tide was turning.
+
+A thump on the window which opened on the front piazza recalled him from
+his reverie. A dozen feet were shuffling on the stones outside, and a
+ruddy face glowed over the sash.
+
+"Go away, Pellams. Got to plug," said Jimmie, hastily resuming his book.
+
+"Relate your predicaments to a constable," said Pellams. "There's going
+to be a Thirsting Bee at the----"
+
+"Can't go. Got to work on my thesis."
+
+"Relate _that_ to your Uncle Adderclaws. Tumble out, now."
+
+Jimmie only shook his head. There was a conference outside in whispers;
+then the gang withdrew with suspicious alacrity. Two minutes later, the
+lock grated with the cautious insertion of a key, and the mob rushed in;
+Jimmie had forgotten the passkey, for whose possession Pellams had held
+up the Jap.
+
+"Ah, say, get out of here, you fellows. I'm digging."
+
+"I know it. And you're going to stop. Gentlemen adventurers"--here
+Pellams mounted a chair--"James Mason, our small but thirsty friend, has
+sourball. Now, I ask you, gentlemen, what is the universal cure for his
+affliction?"
+
+"Beer!" The unanimity of the response would have done credit to a Roman
+mob.
+
+"Quite right ye are, my merry retainers. And will ye, in loving kindness
+to him, apply that remedy?"
+
+"We will! We will!"
+
+"Well said, me liegemen. Jimmie, move along!" and Pellams fell to
+strolling around the room and criticizing its collection of stolen signs
+with the air of one who has discharged his business and stands at ease.
+The rest threw themselves on the man with sourball and were for tearing
+off his outer garments and forcing on his sweater, but Lyman by some
+occult means of his own got the boy aside. One never knew how Frank
+managed the gang; it was always that way; his methods never obtruded
+themselves, all one saw was results.
+
+"I wouldn't if I were you," said he; "they won't understand it, and it
+doesn't do you any good--this sort of thing. Better jolly up."
+
+The Sophomore did not speak; he only shook his head.
+
+"I know what you're holding back for," went on the other; "but going
+down there isn't the same sort of thing; really, it isn't."
+
+Jimmie started a little, inside, as he realized for the first time the
+base of his aversion to dragging himself out on the trip. He turned,
+half-mechanically, and began tugging at his collar. That Phantom should
+never come between him and one single thing he wanted to do. It might
+embitter it all, but it could never prevent him from the outward act. He
+threw his tie over a chair and took off his coat with unnecessary
+emphasis in the movement. Ten minutes later he was treading the primrose
+path of dalliance with an arm around "Nosey" Marion.
+
+There was a cool breeze off the bay, bringing the scent of salt water
+along with the odor of spruce-trees. A voice from the upper regions of
+the Hall called out to the cavalcade, crawling through the half-darkness
+along the road:
+
+"He-ea, you! Bring some back for me!"
+
+A dozen windows slammed open at that, and twenty throats took up the
+noise. Pellams was for answering, but Lyman discreetly checked him.
+
+Presently they swung out into the traveled road, until the noises of the
+Hall were only a composite buzz. The squad was lounging in twos and
+three, talking athletics or humming under the breath march-songs from
+the Orpheum. "Peg" Langdon stopped at the white gate, and took off his
+hat to the cool air.
+
+"This road down is the best thing about Mayfield!"
+
+"Drop the Sequoia!" cried Pellams. "Here, you fellows, hold him! We'll
+have that in a rondeau or something, next week, if you don't hobble the
+muse!"
+
+The editor laughed. It is better to be joked about your own special
+forte than not to have it mentioned, so he was not displeased.
+
+"That's what the bard gets," said he, "for secreting the noxious fluid
+known as the 'Sequoia' verse. But you can't stop the secretion. Some
+day, I am going to write a Ballad of the Road to Mayfield--just to be
+original."
+
+"And you'll kill the traffic."
+
+"Chain the poet!"
+
+"If you don't choke him, he'll get reminiscent."
+
+These from half-a-dozen voices at once.
+
+"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper
+one for the road to Mayfield--just as you have to have an argumentative
+one on the road back."
+
+"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a
+sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like
+writing paragraphs for English Eight."
+
+"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the
+expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog
+he knew.
+
+"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"
+
+Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! _A bas_ Mason!" And
+then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air
+that has split student throats this century long,
+
+    "To drive dull care away!"
+
+And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was
+singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town
+of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.
+
+"Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their
+way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier
+tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the
+rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and
+nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective.
+Pellams assumed instant control.
+
+"We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening.
+Get your places. Hands on your bottles! Open--_corks_! And away we go."
+The party drank in silence.
+
+"Do you begin to improve, James? There is a trace of a smile in the
+left-hand corner of the patient's mouth. Ruffle up his hair and give him
+another while we have him going!"
+
+Someone started a song, and they had another drink to punctuate the
+pause between verses. A ruddier shade was creeping towards the roots of
+Pellams' hair; Lyman, who smiled but seldom, was grinning across the
+table at a Sophomore trying to flip cracker crumbs into his mouth.
+
+"This is a tryout," said Pellams. "The first man that balks at his beer
+will drink raspberry chasers for a month. Hey! look at 'Nosey' Marion
+trying to shirk!"
+
+Sure enough, Marion, who tried to keep up a reputation for capacity with
+a naturally slim endowment, was slyly pouring his last potion into an
+empty beer-case behind him. They fell upon the offender forthwith,
+whipped him into the ranks again, and resumed their seats, laughing and
+panting.
+
+"And now that our erring brother is punished and forgiven--that's as
+good a phrase as I ever saw--punished and forgiven--stick that in the
+Sequoia, Pegasus"--Pellams rambled on, "we've got to have the motif. I
+move from the chair that the guest of the evening gives us 'My Old
+Kentucky Home!' Punish your glass and tune up, Jimmie!"
+
+The cry went on until Jimmie had to respond. He began with the intention
+of singing it quite carelessly, because there was much in his soul that
+night that he dared not show before them all; but Jimmie had the gift of
+song in his heart as in his voice, and he threw himself into the music
+before the first stanza was half done. Only once before had he sung the
+song as he did to-night; it was at last Commencement, when he sang it
+for the Seniors going out on their adventures, and when he was done they
+had all been still and quiet like men who have seen ghosts--as perhaps
+they had, that night, the phantoms of men and times haunting certain
+low, arched buildings they were to see no more.
+
+    "Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!"
+
+Jimmie's tender baritone floated up from the table wistfully sweet, and
+shaken a little with feeling, for the trouble of the week just past was
+sweeping into it. Lyman, listening, knew of what place the boy was
+singing, and mentally noted that he had better be thoughtful of the
+youngster during the rest of the term.
+
+The fellows were quiet for a moment after they had droned out the
+chorus, each one putting his own meaning into that sweet old song of
+farewell, and then, to break the charm, a small voice with a Spanish
+roll in it, piped "Tamales!" at the crack in the door.
+
+"Hey!--Lupe!--make him sing!"
+
+They raided the stock first, and rendered happy with the jingle of
+silver the quaint little remnant of the race who named their valley for
+the blessed Santa Clara. Then, when he had counted it and put it safely
+away with the officious assistance of Pellams Rex, they set him on the
+table in his blue overalls and over-sized hat and made him sing for them
+in his pathetic treble, "La Paloma," and for encore, "Two Leetle Girl
+een Bloo." Pellams removed him after that, claiming that Langdon was
+about to tell the story of his life, which could not be published in the
+Sequoia.
+
+Jimmie Mason had sat there all this time, taking it in and drinking with
+the others, but there was never a cloud on his brain nor a waver in his
+movements. The rest of them wandered from the motif; each was composing
+a fugue of his own, according to the mould of his nature. Scraps of
+their conversation floated in on him between songs--"Got him just below
+the knees--now!"--"and the difference between me and a tank is in the
+inferior receptivity--ain't that a peach?--of the receptacle"--"Now, the
+fallacy of the original proposition, as Herbert Spencer hath it, lies in
+the expression of the component particulars"--this was Langdon--"that
+proves that if I had a board Pellams would be summarily chastised"--"Put
+it down and order up another, here's good drink going stale"--"Whoa,
+Pegasus, old hoss, that's my tamale you have designs on"--"and cut his
+name there"--"sing it down! This is to break training for the third
+time"--"What's the matter with ----ty-eight?"--All this came in on him,
+as he watched them grow from geniality to hilarity and then on toward
+enthusiasm. They had forgotten him; only now and then someone shied a
+cracker at his head and told him to "jolly up."
+
+Another drink, and the patriotic stage was upon them. The King ordered a
+glass, standing, to the Team, and one with a foot on the table to the
+Captain, and one with both feet on the table and glasses to the ceiling
+to the Victory next fall. Someone started the yell; it went round the
+table. Then they joined in on "Here's to Stanford College," with a verse
+for every class and its yell at the end, and before they were done there
+were three howling factions, each trying to cry the others down.
+
+Frank Lyman, he of the steady head, who was quiet or hilarious as he
+willed, but was never beyond the point where he willed to be, sat
+watching good-humoredly from his corner, and noted that Jimmie Mason's
+voice had risen the loudest, and that he, too, had forgotten the motif.
+
+Pellams had wandered into the outer room "to bust the proprietor's
+blamed old nickel-machine and get even," leaving the disturbance to
+subside of its own weight. Coming back suddenly to the door, he cried:
+"Hey, I've got 'em! The raw material and the finished product! Let's
+have a temperance lecture from Lyman."
+
+It was a queer group at the door. The half-gone Pellams, with his face
+flushed and his hair dishevelled, in one of his hands little Lupe,
+hanging to an empty pail and between laughter and tears; the other hand
+tight on the collar of as dirty, as unkempt, and as drunken an old
+loafer as ever hung over a Mayfield bar. Pellams swung the ruin in.
+
+"Now, tell us how you got that fine, large tee!" said the tormentor.
+"Orate to us, General Jackson!"
+
+The old man braced himself, with drunken dignity, against the door.
+
+"You young fellows c'n make fools o' yourselves," he said, "but you
+can't make fool o' me."
+
+"That's all right, pardner--Nature saved us the trouble in your case,"
+said Pellams, the thoughtless.
+
+The clear head in the room--Lyman's always--took it all in; Frank made a
+step to come between the Junior and his victim. Then he turned,
+half-unconsciously, toward Mason. Jimmie was standing with his hands on
+the table, looking straight before him, and in that look Frank read the
+certainty that the case was out of his control. For the Face was rising
+before Jimmie Mason once more; it had twisted itself in with the
+relaxed, foolish features before him, until he saw his father there, a
+mock and a shame. It was not his father, of course--he passed his hand
+before his eyes as though to clear them--but suppose that somewhere else
+a crowd had his father--and he not there to----
+
+The Angel of Pity, or the Universal Conscience, or whatever it is that
+you and I have learned from our books and our teachers to put as our
+symbol of the belief in the higher things, wrote upon his records that
+night that a prayer had gone up, for the first time, from the dingy back
+room of the Hotel Mayfield.
+
+Pellams had the old man singing now, in a cracked, maudlin voice, and
+his keeper was beating time with a billiard cue. Then the amateur
+conductor had one of his inspirations.
+
+"Hey, a trio! The event of the evening! General Hardshell Jackson,
+Señor Lupe de Tamale, and the renowned lyric barytone, James Russell
+Lowell Mason, will combine in a grand farewell concert. Ascend the
+platform, Señor!" he cried to the Mexican lad, who stood, wide-eyed, in
+a corner. Then he gestured wildly toward the door.
+
+"Hey, Jimmie, come back here," he called; "don't let him out, boys!"
+
+Jimmie had reached the door when Lyman caught his sleeve.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"Home."
+
+"You mean the Hall?"
+
+Jimmie pulled free of the Senior's hand.
+
+"No!" he said. "Home."
+
+
+
+
+A SONG CYCLE AND A PUNCTURE.
+
+
+
+
+A Song Cycle and a Puncture.
+
+    "And I learned about women from 'er!"
+
+                              KIPLING.
+
+
+Six Madonnas, from their places on the Chapel walls, gazed at the
+spectacle of a student with long hair and energetic manner drilling a
+chorus of young men and women from behind the preacher's desk. There was
+no visible sign of agitation on the part of the six Madonnas, though an
+operatic rehearsal in Chapel might be considered reason enough. To be
+sure, one of them, with her feet upon a crescent moon, kept her eyes
+fixed religiously on the ceiling, but this had become a habit. The
+Madonnas were not surprised.
+
+The early years of the University, when there was no assembly hall and
+the temporary chapel was used for everything that did not demand the
+superior accommodations of the men's gymnasium, had prepared them for
+anything. They had looked calmly down upon student farces and Wednesday
+evening prayer meetings, professional impersonations and baccalaureate
+sermons. Once, there had been a German farce under the protection of
+the Germanic Language department, by a company from town, a boisterous
+play with a gigantic comedienne in a short skirt. Beside this
+performance, Lillian Arnold's singing a love duet with Jack Smith was
+nothing very shocking.
+
+Connor, the man who was getting up the opera for the benefit of the
+Junior Annual, waved his baton gracefully and looked pleased. The
+rehearsal had gone well that afternoon, and now Cap Smith was singing
+with creditable expression the love song in the last act. The experience
+of Connor told him that this song would make even the bleachers at the
+back of the gymnasium keep a respectful silence, which was saying a good
+deal. Smith had a very pretty tenor, redeeming its lack of volume by a
+sympathetic quality that was decidedly pleasant. In a song like this,
+his voice came out well. There was a high note at the end to be taken
+pianissimo with something else that signified "as though you meant it."
+Smith could make it sound so, at any rate. One girl at the back of the
+chorus always said, "Ah," under her breath when the song was ended at
+rehearsal.
+
+Lillian Arnold, who played opposite Smith in the opera, did not conceal
+from herself the pleasure she took in the part. Long before rehearsals
+began, she had spent her smiles upon Connor with a view to that very
+rôle. Miss Arnold was a young person who knew the things she wanted;
+one of them was Smith. 'Varsity end, champion pole-vaulter, Glee Club
+tenor and Sophomore president, which means principally leading the
+cotillion, he was well worth a girl's trouble. There was the more glory
+in the winning of this capital prize because he was not very
+enthusiastic about Roble. There was somebody up in town who took a great
+deal of his blue fraternity-paper. Lillian Arnold knew about the girl in
+town, so she accepted gracefully what the gods gave and was outwardly
+content.
+
+The gift of the gods was Ted Perkins, whose vest was decorated like
+Cap's and who had no entanglements. When the approach of the Sophomore
+cotillion set Roble agog with a pleasant but hardly strong-minded
+excitement, he "asked her." Peace of mind comes naturally after such an
+invitation is given and accepted; on rare occasions this does not last.
+
+The first thing that occurred to ruffle Miss Arnold's complacency was a
+chance remark dropped one noon by Perkins as they were strolling home
+obliquely from the Quad.
+
+"Cap isn't going to lead with Miss Martin, after all," said he.
+
+"Indeed!" exclaimed Lillian. For some remote feminine reason the
+announcement was interesting.
+
+"Her family has gone South suddenly, a death or something. Cap is all
+broken up about it. He was going to show her off in style that night."
+
+"I wonder whom he will ask, now," she said, as though it didn't matter
+the least bit in the world.
+
+Down somewhere in a girl's heart lies the gambler's instinct. Lillian
+would have thrown away then and there the certainty of Ned Perkins'
+timely invitation for the torturing suspense, the alluring chance, that
+attended the Sophomore president's second choice. Perkins, in his simple
+masculine dullness, never guessed this.
+
+"I don't believe he knows yet; he wouldn't tell over at the house if he
+did. Another plum for unengaged Roble."
+
+Perkins would have been less at ease over the condition of engaged Roble
+could he have looked into the little east music-room where Lillian
+played accompaniments, and Cap Smith, leaning over a wicker chair, went
+through the music of his part. These cozy rehearsals in the quiet
+afternoons had resulted in Smith's asking himself, during a cut home
+through the Quad, why he had never noticed Lillian Arnold in particular.
+Connor, the director, had a keener eye, evidently. She was pretty,
+dashing and real good fun. Perkins was entitled to respect for his
+selection. Lillian was "all right;" this is a masculine term which may
+mean anything from mild approval to the rapture of "just one girl." The
+mild interpretation, of course, is to be put upon Smith's use of the
+term, even after he had been to Roble two evenings. Their talk was about
+the opera, nothing further, and when he had taken his high note with
+just the proper emotional slur, they both laughed. To be honest, there
+had been one chat on the moonlit steps of the Museum, but all of this
+went down on the blue fraternity-paper among other confidences.
+
+One afternoon, in the middle of a Spring-time walk, Smith gave utterance
+to a decision concerning which he had already written, dutifully, to an
+interested party in the South. They had passed the willow-fringed bank
+of Lagunita, the red boathouse, the double avenue of young pines, and,
+crossing into the back road, strolled down to the low gate opposite the
+Farm; this they climbed and came into a little hollow where knowing
+people find yellow violets. He had just given her a frank compliment.
+
+"You are the best fence-taker I ever saw for a girl."
+
+"That's one practical result of an hour's credit in gym-work," she
+laughed. "Sometimes, on lovely days like this, I feel almost as though I
+could pole-vault the way you do. It must be glorious to go sailing over
+the bar."
+
+"And hear it come clattering down after you?"
+
+They sat on the soft, new grass, and Lillian caught, one after another,
+the shy yellow faces peering at her through the long leaves. She looked
+so spring-like, so much a part of the fresh, young landscape in its
+robes of early February, as she half reclined to reach out for a blossom
+larger and yellower than the rest--a pose that she knew was good--that
+the Sophomore president put an end to suspense.
+
+"I had expected to lead the cotillion with Miss Martin," he began, "but
+she has gone South, so I'm badly left. I'm afraid you are engaged for
+it, aren't you?"
+
+Lillian gazed fixedly at the white cupola on a stockfarm building. Her
+heart was somewhere deep in hill-grass. She was the most luckless girl
+in the whole college! The opportunity of her Sophomore year had come too
+late. It was bitter enough for tears.
+
+"I had promised it to Mr. Perkins," she said, irresolutely.
+
+"I was afraid so. Of course, it was awfully late to ask you; but I would
+rather go with you than with any of the others, so I ventured."
+
+It was a desperate moment for Lillian.
+
+"I would rather go with you, too," she said, gazing up at him.
+
+"I'm sure I wish you could," he said, with sincerity. She was at her
+prettiest that day.
+
+"I will anyway," she declared.
+
+"But Ted----"
+
+"I don't care," she went on, "it was only that he asked me first.
+Couldn't I cut it and go with you? He ought to understand that I have a
+right to change my mind."
+
+Smith watched the antics of a gopher for a full minute before he
+replied. Although Perkins had said nothing to him of his intentions
+regarding the dance--the two had few confidences--Cap had held his
+theories. Still, he deemed he had a chance. Being a Sophomore, he
+believed that he was thoroughly acquainted with the co-educated sex and
+all their wiles and guiles; but a feeling of repulsion toward this frank
+readiness to throw down another man, one of his own, too, drowned his
+sense of self-satisfaction at finding himself preferred.
+
+"Of course, you and Ted must arrange all that," he said, and turned the
+conversation.
+
+Cap's lack of confidential relations with Perkins did not stand in the
+way of his mentioning the affair to him that night after dinner.
+
+"I thought you ought to know it, Ted," he concluded. "Of course, you
+will do as you please about the matter, only I shall not take her."
+
+"You don't think for a moment that _I_ still intend to, do you?" asked
+Perkins, fiercely.
+
+"I don't believe I'd blame you exactly if you backed out," said the
+complacent Sophomore; "but, of course, it's none of my funeral now; I'm
+only sorry I happened to ask her myself, and start the trouble."
+
+"I think I'll walk home with her after rehearsal," said Perkins.
+
+"Well, I shan't say anything about it one way or the other," said Smith,
+and he started toward the Gym with a pleasant sense of having galled
+somebody a bit.
+
+Meanwhile, Lillian had eaten her dinner with relish. The prospect of
+trouble with Perkins did not worry her in the least. Perkins had been
+rather a convenience, and to lead the cotillion with Jack Smith was a
+delight that entirely divested the other man of all importance. The
+rehearsal went through with a dash; Lillian was all animation and
+witchery, and the love-scene was perfectly acted, though Ted Perkins sat
+glowering in the privileged audience. Cap Smith took his high note with
+a tenderness of voice and gesture that moved Connor, the leader (he was
+also stage-manager and chief electrician), to call out, "Good boy, Cap,"
+and to shake his carefully untrimmed hair in approval.
+
+After rehearsal, the tenor slipped away just as Perkins, with an
+artificial smile, approached Lillian.
+
+The Sophomore was in bed when Perkins came into his room.
+
+"What did you do about it?" Cap asked, to start things.
+
+"I simply said I wanted to be excused from taking her to the cotillion."
+
+"What reason did you give?"
+
+"None."
+
+"But you had to give some explanation."
+
+"She didn't ask for any. She guessed it, probably."
+
+"What did she say? Try to smooth it over?"
+
+"No, nothing, except that she was sorry, and that she would have liked
+to go with me."
+
+"Humph," sniffed Cap. "I'll bet she was afraid I hadn't said anything to
+you about it, and she wouldn't give herself away as long as you didn't
+kick up a row. Now I suppose she expects me to take her."
+
+"That's where she was keen, all right; she never breathed a word about
+you; only made me feel like two-bits in a fog for having turned her
+down."
+
+"If I had been you I would have roasted her right there, fired the whole
+string at her."
+
+This was the point for which the jilted man had come into Cap's room.
+
+"No," said he, "you said you wouldn't take her either, and I thought
+that would punish her better than having any scene with me. She'll know
+I have had my innings."
+
+This took Smith where he lived, but he put on a cheerful front,
+perforce:
+
+"Well, I'll crawl gracefully out of it, to-morrow," said he. "I suppose
+she'll be hopping when she thinks it over."
+
+Perkins went up to his room satisfied.
+
+When Cap Smith caught Miss Arnold at the post-office, he began to find
+that it was easier to plan a graceful crawling out than to execute the
+movement.
+
+"I shall have to take back what I said yesterday about the cotillion,"
+he began, cleverly, guiding her toward Roble, "because, you see, it
+wouldn't be just square to Ted, would it? He might feel hurt, and I
+wouldn't have that. We must have six dances, though, anyway."
+
+This, assuredly, would show her. Unfortunately, Lillian was either dull
+or desperate.
+
+"But he released me last night."
+
+"Did he?" said Jack. He had started all wrong.
+
+"Yes, we settled it all very well; he didn't seem to care in the least,
+he is so good-natured." She looked as serene as the sky above her,
+although she was beginning to have biting suspicions. "So it's all
+right."
+
+Cap Smith's feet had become tangled in crawling; he kicked out
+recklessly.
+
+"No, it's not all right. I don't believe in a girl's treating a fellow
+like that, and I won't be a party to it."
+
+"Why did you ask me, then?" she challenged. "To tempt me because you
+happened to be president and a girl loves to lead?"
+
+"I'm not so mean as that. How could I know Perkins had asked you. He
+hadn't told me."
+
+"I suppose you told him about it?"
+
+"Yes, I thought that I ought to."
+
+"After telling me that I might arrange it. It was my business."
+
+"I knew how you would do it, and I wasn't willing that Ted should be cut
+that way."
+
+"What a lovely friendship!" said Lillian. She was much vexed.
+
+Smith did not reply at once. The beauty of his friendship with Perkins
+did not strike him very heavily at the moment.
+
+"At any rate, under the circumstances I don't feel that I can take you
+to the cotillion."
+
+"Don't flatter your--" Lillian was too angry to speak without crying, so
+she went into the Hall abruptly.
+
+With the approach of Washington's Birthday, the rage of Miss Arnold
+grew. Inasmuch as everyone took it for granted that she was going with
+Perkins, it was not likely that she would be asked again, instead, late
+beginners, running cards for themselves and other people, asked her for
+dances, and rather than admit her predicament she let them fill her
+card.
+
+The afternoon of the cotillion she went to bed and was ill for a day;
+then she appeared at the final rehearsal with a smiling face and a soul
+full of wrath. She had very little to say to Smith, but otherwise she
+showed no resentment, and her acting was as good as ever. One wiser than
+Cap Smith would have augured ill from her fair seeming, a less confident
+man would have been on his guard; but he had forgotten all that he had
+ever read about the fury of women scorned, and he went to his doom
+unconscious.
+
+The Gym had never held a bigger audience, and the opera, as usual, was
+proving itself the greatest success in the annals of Stanford
+theatricals; the show was so inoffensively proper, Connor declared with
+a sigh, that it was disgusting. No hitch or jar marred the perfect
+running of the performance, and the conductor, directing the
+scene-shifting between acts, stopped now and then to shake hands with
+himself. The borrowed scenery almost fitted; there was no wait of more
+than half an hour; very few of the chorus got out of tune; the costumes
+had been expunged by a board of lady managers and declared officially to
+have no _Said Pasha_ tendencies; the leading ladies were actually
+keeping their tempers; things moved on as smoothly as though the Fates
+were deadening suspicion in order to make the coming catastrophe the
+more overwhelming.
+
+The third act drew on. The low comedian had just finished joshing back
+and forth with the bleachers, whose chorus work had equalled, in some
+respects, that on the stage. A soft light began to illumine the painted
+heavens, and a three-hundred-candle-power Luna, the pride and joy of
+Connor's heart, rose in wavering majesty. The house was quiet now,
+listening to Smith's solo to Lillian in the moonlit garden. The music
+swept softly on to the close of the song. As Jack took a deep breath for
+his tender love-note, the note that was to make men sigh and women
+quiver, Lillian leaned closer to him, as if drawn by the caressing
+sweetness in his voice, and one round, white arm stole about his neck in
+the prettiest gesture imaginable. No one knew that with the other hand
+she had quickly drawn out the big black pin that held the flowers on her
+breast. One wicked jab, and the precious high note broke in a wild
+"ouch" of pain.
+
+The bleachers laughed uproariously.
+
+
+
+
+ONE COMMENCEMENT.
+
+
+
+
+One Commencement.[A]
+
+    "Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave;
+       Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame;
+     Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave."
+
+                                        BRET HARTE.
+
+
+There is one Wednesday morning, the last in May, when the sun, peeping
+over the observatory dome on Mount Hamilton and flooding the wide valley
+of Santa Clara, wakes unfeelingly a reluctant set of mortals to the
+realization that this is the last of their mornings.
+
+The girl in Roble who has lived four happy, independent years where the
+winds of freedom blow, and who is going back this afternoon to the
+household duties and narrow sympathies of a not over-interesting home,
+leans thoughtfully on the foot-rail of her iron bed; the dear, familiar
+view blurs as she gazes out beyond the dormitory room and its
+reminiscent treasures of program and photograph, out where the warm
+light brightens the concrete pillars of the museum and the arboretum
+with its waving tops, and makes the whole fair landscape one Field of
+the Cloth of Gold.
+
+The Encina student who has slaved his uneasy way, with no resources save
+his willingness to do anything that may help him from one semester to
+the next, springs exultantly from his alcove, for to-day he has finished
+the struggle, and there is a good job waiting for him.
+
+Over in the fraternity house, the man who has sung his grasshopper songs
+in careless disregard of changing seasons, and who has found some
+impossible examinations barring his primrose path, blinks painfully at
+the merciless sun of Commencement Day, laughing at him above the roofs
+of siren Mayfield, and holds his foolish head in his hands; for last
+night, while the other Seniors, full of honors and regrets, were trying
+to choke down a little of the good-bye supper after the Promenade, he
+went a bit too far in celebrating his mixed emotions of grief at
+flunking and joy at coming back again.
+
+Upon all alike--upon him who has watched for it, dreading it through
+four enchanted years, as upon him who has forgotten until the list of
+candidates for graduation glared at him from the registrar's
+bulletin-board with a vacancy in that section where his name ought to
+be; upon him who has hoped for this as a commencement in very truth of
+things great and new, as upon him who cares not--shines this early
+sunlight of the last Wednesday in May.
+
+There is never a cloud in the sky this morning; the meadow lark sings
+more joyously than on any other day; the campus is more radiantly
+beautiful, because some hundred and fifty people are looking at it
+through tears for the last time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On his own Commencement Day, Tom Ashley lay sleeping, hidden away from
+the splendor of the morning, two-score miles from the smiling campus.
+
+The man lying next him in the upper tier but one rolled over and shook
+him by the shoulder:
+
+"Wake up, Tom; it's Commencement Day! Don't you want your degree?"
+
+The Senior struggled back from sleep; a dream influence lingered with
+him, a vision of a cloistered enclosure, a dream in which all his
+senses, now assailed by the sights and smells and sounds of a
+troop-ship, drew in again the familiar things; he beheld the red tiles
+a-shimmer above the yellow stone; the aromatic scent of budding
+eucalyptus was in his nostrils, the sound of the young laughter of women
+in his ears. He sat up, gazing uncertainly at the dark, crowded space,
+the narrow stairway, the great iron racks covered with gray-blanketed
+shapes; then he crawled into his uniform and out on the ship's deck. The
+early dawn had set the towers of the city glittering; already the low
+wharf-sheds along the water-front were astir with life. Back of the town
+the twin peaks, named by the early Franciscans for a woman's breasts,
+rose veiled with a filmy scarf of fog. Everywhere below them spangled
+flags in myriads flapped from the tops of the city and among the crowded
+shipping.
+
+Ashley leaned over the rail of the _Peking_ and watched the yellow tide
+slide by with its burden of dèbris. Not far away in the stream lay the
+other two transports, unattended; it was too early for the fussy craft
+that curtseyed about them during the day. At three o'clock that
+afternoon these vessels were to sail for the distant Philippines,
+bearing arms against the ancient country of the Spanish Fathers--the
+pioneers who had shown the Saxon the way to this golden coast and had
+made vine and rose flourish for him on the barren sandhills, that he
+might now strip from the land of their forefathers the last possession
+of a dying empire. By the strange turnings of history, from the very
+city of their patron saint the New World was sending forth its first
+hostile expedition against the Old, and the great community that had
+grown from their nestling mission of Dolores would shriek Godspeed to
+these enemies of Old Spain.
+
+Nothing of this was in Ashley's mind as he watched the water lapping at
+the beach-side of the transports. He kept saying over in his mind the
+words of his bunk-mate, "It's Commencement Day! Don't you want your
+degree?"
+
+In spite of the seriousness of the situation, Tom, looking at his coarse
+blue uniform, smiled as he thought on his plans for Graduation Week.
+Those feet, now clad in new government gunboats, were to have waltzed
+but two nights before in shining patent-leather at the head of the
+Senior Ball. Only yesterday he should have been galloping around the
+bases in fantastic costume at the Senior-Faculty game. Monday afternoon,
+when he should have been before the Chapel site with Her, listening to
+the glories of the Class as told over its freshly-mortared plate, he was
+tramping on the wrenching cobble-stones of Market Street with a bunch of
+roses in his campaign hat and another in his gun barrel, and the city
+going mad on the curbing. Lord High Ruler of the Senior dance and
+counsellor in all the affairs of the Class, he was cooped up with a
+thousand others on the troopship _City of Peking_, a sergeant at
+eighteen a month and lucky to get so much, with a chain of superiors
+ordering his comings and goings.
+
+All this because of the destruction of an American battleship in the
+harbor of Havana.
+
+The notes of a bugle-call drifted across the water from the nearest
+transport, and Tom's mind went back to the time when the unfamiliar
+sound was first heard on the Stanford campus. It seemed like a very old
+memory, although it was but three weeks past. He remembered how, when
+the recruiting sergeant came down from the city, the after-dinner crowd
+used to sit on the Hall steps watching him drill the men in the
+moonlight. After drill, they would loaf in his Hall room, talking it
+over, and when the civilians had drifted off to bed or to the inglorious
+studies of a routine now ended for Tom, he would sit with "Nosey" Marion
+and blow smoke. Neither spoke much, only a word now and then, but they
+were thinking of the same thing.
+
+The days passed; the college used to drop out between recitations to
+watch them drilling on the football field; the uniforms arrived, and
+then the orders. There was a baseball rally that night, but when the
+enlisted men came into the Hall and word was passed that they were going
+on the morrow, the occasion was all theirs. Marion, who had been twice
+on the debating team, stood up, looking slimmer than ever in his plain
+blue, and spoke for them. He said only simple things; it was not like
+his speech of a year before, when his impassioned arguments turned
+defeat into victory at the Inter-Collegiate; but the crowd listened with
+their eyes on the floor and applauded with their hands only when he had
+done, because they couldn't trust their voices. They sang the terrible
+"Battle Hymn of the Republic" after that; Langdon led it. "Peg" could
+hardly carry a tune with that awful voice of his, but he sang the verses
+so that the chills ran down your back and you had to join in the chorus,
+"Our God is marching on."
+
+Next day they themselves were marching on, forty of them, with hardly a
+thought of what they were leaving behind, their minds fixed on the
+distant Isles of Philip. Tom had never expected to leave the campus in
+that spirit. He loved it all, from the quiet slopes by Frenchman's Lake
+to that lofty redwood treetop, first rampart of the smiling city to the
+eager Freshman, last long-watched glimpse of the land of his memories to
+the reluctant Senior.
+
+He had always felt that it would be a tug to say good-bye, yet he, too,
+his mind over-seas, had gone away to town with hardly a thought. He had
+time to reflect in that dreary fortnight at the Presidio when the
+unseasonable rains drenched his tent, and the wretched routine of beans
+and coffee hurt the romance of enlistment.
+
+The life had its compensating features. Every city girl he had ever met
+in College or town society came out to camp and asked for him at K
+Street--K Street with its saucy cardinal flag waving above the first
+tent to the left. Most of them brought candy; a vary few, with
+super-feminine understanding, made it beer; one, she was a genius, sent
+over on a drizzling evening a piping-hot steak. Then, too, he had three
+white angles on his sleeve and "Sergeant Ashley" sounded well. Cap Smith
+was not even a corporal; the emphasis with which Cap mentioned the fact
+showed anything but college spirit.
+
+These things made it easier not to think about the campus and what the
+rest of the fellows were doing, but the old life came drifting in after
+all. Sometimes, after the long, hard morning drill on the green slope
+beyond the car-track, between drill and the welcome mess-call, Marion
+would come into the Sergeant's tent and they would sit apart to talk
+about the Faculty game or the Senior ball and the dances they had
+expected to put on their cards. Each Saturday some of the boys came up
+and brought the campus news. One time, all enlisted Stanford tumbled
+out of their tents, every last one of them, to welcome a big,
+slow-moving, slow-speaking man, who plays first-base at the Commencement
+Game. A corporal who had never been to college and who had a newspaper
+idea of students, asked if that was the football captain whom they were
+crowding around and almost trying to hug, and Marion answered no; that
+he was a bigger man than even the head coach. The boys held their
+visitor until the officer of the day ordered civilians out of camp, and,
+when the unfeeling guard drove him out, they gave the yell in good old
+style. The colonel sent his orderly to find what was the matter, for it
+was a high offence against martial law, and when the messenger reported
+that it was those Stanford kids in K, yelling for their President, his
+superior said that he guessed it was all right; this was the first
+California regiment, and the old man was a part of the state. This was
+before the final dispatches came, before the men learned that they were
+going on the first expedition.
+
+Monday morning and marching orders. On this, the morning of Wednesday,
+as he looked across the water and watched the city growing brighter, he
+thrilled again with the remembrance of that feeling, that purely
+physical tingling of the nerves, which came over him at the barracks
+when he lifted his gun to start. The load on his back was snug and
+light as he stood there in marching rig; how much heavier and harder it
+was to grow before he should stand on American soil again, he could not
+know. Then, the shuffling of many feet and the flutter of a flag outside
+the stone gates, so strangely like the gates which stand at the entrance
+of the Land of his Memories--and his Commencement week had begun.
+
+Class Day, from that time, on, lay in his memory a mass of unassimilated
+matter to be thought out in the long weeks of idleness on the _Peking's_
+blistering deck. The crowd, huge, wild, packed from building to curb,
+the merry, merry flags waving them on, the little kaleidoscopic flashes
+of expressions which he caught, when he stopped to look at them, on the
+grim faces to right and left,--all these impressions and many more were
+jumbled in his brain. He remembered the excitement and sympathy mingled
+in the countenances of the people. One or two little things were caught
+along with the larger recollections--a woman's face that looked like
+Hers and almost made him forget for the moment that She was then
+doubtless listening to the Class history; a baby holding a flag in its
+little hand, and staring with awed, uncomprehending eyes at the
+sober-faced soldiers tramping on and on; a man mounted on a truck crying
+above the cheering, "Give 'em hell for us!" A remembrance that stood
+out above the others was that of someone calling a good-bye to the
+Major, of the choke in the officer's voice as he answered. He was an
+older man, and his expression of feeling nearly upset Tom. He trudged
+on, file-closer for the front rank and six-feet-one of target, and
+wondered if he had been a fool after all. It was well enough for those
+people yelling acclaim from street and housetop; but they were going
+back home, or down to the University, and he--to the troopship, and the
+high seas, and after that no telling. The strap of his knapsack hurt
+him. They said that Manila was a furnace. He wished that the women would
+stop loading them with flowers; he wished that Pellams and the other
+fellows wouldn't keep running out to march beside him; didn't they know
+how hard he was trying to hold it back? And what did this going amount
+to, anyway? If he had staid out, there would have been only one gap in
+the company. Then, in a rest, Pellams got to his side with a bottle of
+ice-cold Pilsener and Tom pointed its base to the sky and gained
+courage.
+
+There was a falling apart to his right, and he felt rather than saw that
+his mother had slipped through the crowd and taken his hand in her slim,
+white one, was marching beside him over the cruel cobble-stones;
+Pellams, too, closed up on the other side, for the officers were not
+trying to keep the alignment as they drew near the end. These three went
+on together, she trying to be brave now that the last had come, Pellams
+clumping along over the rough pavement and joking in ecstatic disregard
+of the discomfort of his fat body. It was over at last, the mounted
+police were pushing back the crowd; it was to be all alone now. The
+Stanford men gave their yell together, the volunteer held his mother
+close for a moment. Then,--"Company, attention!"--the dock faded into
+mist, so that he stumbled on the gangway.
+
+Not until that night, when a group of them paced along the wharf, had
+anyone spoken of Class Day. Cap Smith had started it.
+
+"They are going to the Ball now," said he.
+
+"I wonder if Lyman came out ahead on the Show," said Marion, his eye on
+the dollar, even at that solemn moment.
+
+"I wonder if the programs got down in time," said Tom, and then he
+laughed to think of himself, the chairman of the Ball committee,
+plodding along the splintered dock in a dusty uniform and buff leggings
+and with the rudiments of a scraggly beard on his face. It was a queer
+ending.
+
+Down there, the others were floating round, now, to high-priced music
+from town. In a little note which Pellams had brought him from Her that
+morning, she had said that she was to wear a small silk flag instead of
+flowers this time. He would have liked to peep in, as he used to from
+the gym roof when he was a Freshie, to see if she had really done it.
+
+During these wharf-edge musings, taps had blown, bringing the men on
+board again. On the way up the plank, he remembered, they passed one of
+the fellows with his face in his hands, and Tom had to put his arm
+around the boy and lead him, so that he might be in quarters in time.
+Neither of them could know that this was to be the one who did not
+return.
+
+He had his first sight of the hold, after that, and the truth knocked
+out some of the poetry. Ashley, and K Company in general, were quartered
+just over the screw; but a man gets used to anything, even to bullets
+that sing past your ears and clip off little bamboo leaves about two
+feet from your hair. There were twelve hundred men below decks; when
+most of the landsmen should be seasick--ugh!
+
+The second night, Tuesday, he had sat with Cap among the coiled ropes on
+deck. Beyond the shipping, the city of hills twinkled at them, striped
+with long, sloping lines of dotted light; out of the blackness above,
+the crown of the Spreckels building made a circlet like a halo over St.
+Francis and his city; across the bay slid the mysterious, luminous
+honeycombs of the silent ferry-boats. Far aft, the band was trying to
+cheer things up with a Sousa march. That very tune was being played,
+probably, down there where the Quadrangle, softly glowing with the faint
+edging of lanterns, shimmered in the fairy-land mystery of long
+palm-studded vistas, a-flutter with white dresses.
+
+"They are saying good-bye to each other, now," said Tom, by way of a
+feeler.
+
+"Humph!" said Cap. He was flat on his back, looking up at the stars. "It
+doesn't mean anything. When you're going to pull out across the Pacific
+for God knows what, then it's different."
+
+"I didn't expect to spend this evening lying on a ship's deck," murmured
+Tom. He was thinking of what the Promenade Concert usually means to
+people who have been taught something by co-education. That good-bye,
+said in the Quadrangle when the music and the thoughtless people have
+gone and the lanterns blaze up and drop, one after another, and lie
+smoldering on the moonlit asphalt; those last words with people from
+whom you have concealed yourself these four years and to whom you can
+now afford to lay open your heart, as can the happy dead, because your
+ways after to-night may lie apart,--Tom knew that this good-bye does
+mean something, in spite of the superior announcement of Sophomore
+Smith. Only it meant more to a fellow lying thinking about it among the
+ropes of a transport's deck, with the Spaniards in prospect.
+
+Cap's cigarette shone like a glowworm in the shadow of the stack.
+
+"Our good-bye supper will be sloppy weather, all right;" said he. "Six
+going out."
+
+"No," answered Tom, "it won't be a drunk to-night, Cap. You haven't been
+in long enough. I'll bet they don't get through the first case; I'll bet
+it's a cry. You didn't see '95 go out."
+
+"Well, perhaps," assented the Sophomore. "The fellows are pretty well
+worked up."
+
+Tom went back to his Freshman days.
+
+"I remember our '95 feed in the Hall. Stanton cried that night, and
+Gray. I never saw them do it before." Then, more slowly, "It must be
+tough on a girl."
+
+After which he was not talkative.
+
+There was little enough, this last morning, to suggest Commencement, as
+he leaned on the damp rail of the ship and dreamed over the last few
+days. A voice at his elbow said:
+
+"Captain wants you, Sergeant."
+
+Tom started out of his reverie, and the military tilt came into his
+back. He was not a student bidding the College farewell; he was a
+sergeant at eighteen a month and lucky to get so much.
+
+The city had awakened when he came to the rail again. There was a tense
+feeling abroad, a gathering excitement that grew through the morning.
+All manner of water-craft fussed and fumed and dodged around the
+transports,--tugs, rowboats, launches and clumsy river steamers strung
+with flags and black with civilians. One tug that hung close by shone
+with more color than the others by reason of the women crowding it; Tom
+could discern the face of his mother looking, looking with yearning eyes
+that would have called him back. He drew a quick breath of surprise and
+his hands tightened on the black rigging. There on the tug, standing
+beside his mother instead of among those who were saying good-bye to the
+Campus, he saw the Other One.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon after three, the screw throbbed, moved, the craft wheeled into
+lines flanking the huge vessel; the noises of the city awoke:
+
+    "For the large birds of prey
+     They'll carry you away,
+     And you'll never see your soldiers any more."
+
+The grey town lay back among her hills, shrieking with every manner of
+mechanical voice her farewell to the troops. Above this uproar rose and
+fell the weird sobbing of a siren and a cannon from the top of a
+sky-scraper boomed in at solemn intervals. On the roofs were knots of
+people flashing white signals of Godspeed; when the wind was right, one
+could catch, very faintly, the sound of their cheering.
+
+The flotilla drew around the curving water-front and toward the Gate. To
+the left, the remains of the camp dotted the plain below the Presidio
+hills; every last man of them was on the bulkhead in front of the fort,
+waving his brown hat and cheering the lucky devils who went first. The
+great hill guns bellowed good-bye as the transports slipped through the
+gleaming strait. Gradually the convoy wheeled 'round again, the bigger
+vessels keeping up until outside the Heads. Then the first expedition
+went on alone.
+
+Tom Ashley, Senior and 'Varsity fullback, with his eyes wet in spite of
+himself, set his face to the west. The round sun hung red above the
+horizon; a few seconds earlier, it had looked over the Palo Alto hills
+at the deserted University campus. Beyond the ship, a path of gold lay
+out toward Manila and its future. Marion, leaning beside him, looked
+back at the fading line of surf below the Cliff House.
+
+"Well, Tom," he said, a bit huskily, "Commencement Day's over."
+
+"Yes," answered the Sergeant, without turning, "we're up against it, all
+right!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [Footnote A: On May 25, 1898, Commencement Day at the
+  University, the First California Volunteers sailed for the
+  Philippine Islands. With Company K of that regiment went
+  thirty-five Stanford students, a part of the hundred who
+  volunteered, in various regiments, for the Spanish War.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
+
+Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
+possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Obvious
+typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have
+been fixed. Corrections in the text are noted below, with corrections
+inside the brackets:
+
+Table of Contents: typos fixed
+
+  The Substituted Full-back[Fullback]
+
+  A Song-cycle[Song Cycle] and a Puncture
+
+page 21: typo fixed
+
+  "Ill[I'll] be hanged if I will!" shouted the
+  patient, preparing to rise.
+
+page 106: typo fixed
+
+  special runs up on the University track and stops
+  betwen[between] the Library and Encina, the flaming bunting
+
+page 141: typo fixed
+
+  Your theory might work all right at a city college or even at
+  Berkeley, but on this campus, nit[not] so!"
+
+page 270: typo fixed
+
+  talking it over, and when the civilians had drifted off to
+  ed[bed] or to the inglorious studies of a routine now ended for
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stanford Stories, by 
+Charles K. Field and Will H. Irwin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STANFORD STORIES ***
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