“Say, Tommie, which is the juke—the feller in white or the feller with the red face?”
One day a grinning boy presented himself at my door and asked if I would take him for a roommate. I had two bedrooms and was glad to have a companion. We became the heads of the sign-stealing crowd. The police commissioner of Cambridge had announced that he would jail the next offender in this line, and this was enough to set us madly at it. We stole business signs and street signs, tore the name plates off doors, wagons, and horse cars. My roommate’s father was horrified to see on the outside of our door, when he visited us on Class Day, the sign, “H. H. Crocker and Co.,” which had been missing from his place of business for four years. When I came home from Europe in ’91, my mother asked me to throw away some trophies. Among them were eighteen signs of ground glass upon which was printed in black “Harvard Street,” and a policeman’s badge which I had been very proud of getting in a fight.
I always hated to lie; but at that time was content if I kept to the letter of the truth and disregarded the spirit. I was afraid of flunking a certain examination, and knew I could pass if I only had more time to work up the subject. Thinking up every kind of excuse, I finally decided that only a physical disability would let me off. Consequently, I did something that required more courage for one who has always been afraid of physical pain than it is easy to imagine. Making a deep gash in my thumb, I told the professor I couldn’t hold a pen, as I had “cut myself with a razor”—which was perfectly true. Of course, he let me off.
Out of our poverty and desire for a good time grew some interesting things. A crowd of us who cared for cheap vaudeville went in weekly, on Mondays, to the Howard Athenæum, incidentally the smuttiest and most improper show I have ever seen anywhere—and this in Boston! We pledged ourselves to spend only fifty cents on the evening’s entertainment, and this sum was generally divided as follows——ten cents for car fare, thirty-five cents for a standee ticket, and five cents for a beer, making it necessary to walk back if we failed to beat our way on the street car.
Whenever anyone had what we called a “find”—earned something or had a check outside his allowance—we allowed him to treat, never otherwise. The feed generally consisted of a barrel of beer and several dozen oysters which we put in the coals of the fireplace, and, as they popped open, threw in salt and pepper, and then squeezed their noses together when they were ready to serve.
From this we began dining together once a month, and somehow came to be known as “The Ring.” There were James Duane Lowell (nephew of the poet), Ned Higginson, Ned Walker, Frank Childs Faulkner, Waldo Reed, and others I can’t recall; but although many sought to join us, we never increased our number, and I think therein lay our success. We met each time in a different member’s room, the host of the occasion providing two roast chickens and bread and butter. The others contributed something strictly limited to a dollar in price, which usually turned out to be a bottle of whisky. Each one of us could bring in his chum as a guest, and as we sat around the table, our bellies full and the alcohol sending a glow over our beings, the songs and stories that passed around that board would have been epoch making, could we have preserved them.
Indeed, a desire to keep some of them did crop up, and it was here, at one of these dinners, that the Harvard Crimson was born. We called it the Magenta then, as the Civil War was too recent for cochineal to be cheap, and crimson was not to be had. The Advocate was the college paper of those days, and we decided it was much too stuffy and needed a rival.
I was entirely too crazy to be allowed an editorship, so had to be content with sundry contributions. I remember being received at home with freezing looks after publishing my first—and last—“poetry,” a translation of one of the Odes of Anacreon. The family objected to:
When I drink wine, etc.
In my curving arm I hold a maiden.