"Gentlemen," yelled the senior, "your committee begs leave to report that it has discovered the abominable truck that has been ruining our palates and torturing our vitals. It's these cans of trichinated pork, unclassable sausages and mildewed beef that have made life a saturnalia of dyspepsia for us, and every one of 'em bears the label 'Graham & Company, Chicago.'"
Then you ought to have heard the roaring.
"Down with Graham & Co.!" "Let's go to Chicago and lynch Graham." "Confounded old skinflint!" the fellows shouted. I turned pale and thought what a narrow escape I was having.
Just then up got little "Bud" Hoover, old Doc's grandson, whom you have always held up to me as a model of truth-telling you know. Bud's a sophomore, and thinks he's a bigger man than old Eliot.
"Here's Graham's son," he piped in his rat-tail-file voice that you could hear over all the rumpus, and pointing right at me, "Ask him about it."
There was nothing for it for me but to get up and defend the family honor. As I was about to speak I saw another fellow running in from the kitchen with a big ham, yellow covered and bearing a big red label,—your label. I had a great inspiration. I felt that ham would prove our salvation.
"Gentlemen, I am the son of John Graham," I said haughtily, "and glad of it, for he has got more dough than this whole blamed college is worth; and, to show that you're all wrong, I'm going to quote something that he wrote me last week. Just you listen:
"'If you'll probe into a thing which looks sweet and sound on the skin to see if you can't fetch up a sour smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.'"
That hit 'em in great shape, and "Hippo" Smith took a big carver and slashed the ham into shoe-strings in about thirty seconds. Then he lifted the bone to his nose and let out a yell that sent all the girls upstairs flying. The other fellows sniffed and bellowed with him.
The next thing I knew the bone landed violently on my neck and the air was full of tin cans, four of which met splendid interference from my head. When I came to I could hear four hundred voices shouting "Piggy, piggy, oowee, oowee oowee," at me, and I knew I had passed through a baptism of rapid fire. They were the "roast beef and blood-gravy boys" you mentioned in your letter, for sure.