The next two to step up for the pleasure of boxing were larger boys.
These were well matched in every respect, both as to size, muscle and grit. We knew they would make good. They were both anxious to please their friends, and apart from that were chums. Could two bosom friends come together and try to get the best of each other? That was the thought uppermost in every one's mind. Well, they did, fought like little men, a square, game fight, each bound to win to show there was no queer business; but there were only two rounds fought. Then as each had won one, the boxing bout was ended, to the satisfaction of audience and performers.
But we have other ways of amusing ourselves beside the two I have just mentioned.
The boys who love chess will find partners to play with, and can sit contented, making one and a half moves during the entire evening, if it so please them to deliberate like that.
The checker fiends can play checkers to their heart's content, jumping his men and crowning a man king without half the fuss the usual crowning of kings calls for.
He just sticks one checker on the top of another checker, when he has got to the top row, looks his opponent in the eye, and says "King," then begins to waltz backward and forward up and down, sweeping all the poor little men he finds in his way into the discard. He seems to forget the time when he was only a little man himself. How like live men that is! While some will be considerate of those they have left behind them in the race for fame and fortune, others will step over them or push them out of their way.
That old time game of dominoes must not be forgotten. How many weary hours it has beguiled away! New games may come and new games will go, when we are tired of them, but our pleasant little oblong friends from blank blank to double six will always find a welcome here.
Then Lotto. Why, I am anything but a spring chicken, yet Lotto was an old game when I was young. What a hurry and flurry to cover with bits of glass the numbers as quickly as they were called, and what a joyful yell when you were out first!
On warm nights the boys sit out of doors on the Campus. Some one starts up a college song and the fun begins. All the old time and all the new songs. Among the voices a young tenor is heard; he leads, all the rest joining in the chorus.
Such a medley of sounds—the boy who can sing and is willing, the boy who can't sing and wants to; never mind, when one is young everything goes; it is only when one grows old that one becomes hypercritical.