Officers and professors come hastening back from the section room, gay turnouts wheel hither and thither, and the cadets are presently out in force. For drill, for parade, for walks, according to the time of year and the state of the weather. Football was not yet the rage, in Magnus Kindred's time, nor bicycles; and so every man you met was practising the noble art of walking, or showing how splendidly West Point can ride.
As November speeded away, Christmas leave began to rise up in the distance, and to claim many thoughts. Men who had lost it were down on their "luck" (the cadet spelling for carelessness), men who had won it debated in what way the few dear hours of freedom should be spent; and many a fellow from some far-down or far-off corner of the land stood pledged to go with his happier friend whose home was nearer by.
In all these joys, as usual, the poor fourth classmen had no share. They walked, indeed, like the rest; one must do something; but they talked gloomy things. No Christmas leave for them—and not much of anything else but hard work. They were not supposed to need anything else. No damsels on the sidewalk proffered them sugar plums, very few people even knew them by sight.
I will do Magnus Kindred the justice to say that the keen memory of some of his own early days at the Post made him a little bit thoughtful of these forlorn young strangers. It was no great credit to him, perhaps, if he now and then passed on to fourth class hands a box of Miss Flirt's best candy, but he did better than that. He gave words of encouragement and counsel, cheered up the faint hearts, and would smile and speak to a pleb on the sidewalk, just as if he himself had not been first sergeant, and a prime favourite with the ladies.
Some people will say he could have had no time to look after anyone but himself, but you never know how much you have, till you divide it up with needy people. And I doubt if helping takes more time than hazing. It is rather a question of which word you will say, what look you will give. And there had come to Cadet Kindred the wholesome perception that he could be a power for good or for evil, with all these younger boys. Consciously or unconsciously, they were watching the upper classmen, and taking tone from them.
"What is in the way of your living just as earnest Christian lives here, as at home?" he had said one day to some plebs who were gradually sliding back from all their good home habits. And one answered:
"Because we are so far from home, sir, and can't go to church so often, and can't keep Sunday as we have been taught."
But another said boldly:
"Because the first classmen are so different in camp from what they are in prayer-meeting."
And it set Magnus to thinking. His own pleb days were not so long past that he could forget how he used to watch Mr. Upright, to see what all his brave words in the prayer meeting came to in the week; finding the first captain's straight everyday walk a constant help. And just such service he himself was called upon to render to these new men.