He glared with mock savagery at the bewildered Freshman, who replied,
“Please sir, I am working very hard, sir!”
“If you call that work, then,” stormed the football man, “I wonder what you do when you loaf? Die probably, eh?”
“I thought, sir—” persisted the Freshman, but he was cut short by the football man who said,
“Just carry that up to my room, put it straight, set the furniture in place, and then go to work and copy those marked extracts from the coach’s note-book which you’ll find on the desk. Hurry and have it done in two hours’ time!”
As the football man ended those savage orders, he turned away with an amused smile and as he came towards us he winked and said to the Senior,
“That young cuss’s got the making of a fine kid in him, even if he is the son of a several hundred thousand dollar Senator. Just watch him make the dust fly! Ain’t he a peacherino, though!”
The Senior informed me, after the football man had strolled away, that the fagging was in full force just then and that the Freshmen took it in good humor, and, in fact, would have considered themselves not actually at college had that feature been omitted.
The different noises that filled the air made a Babel. From dormitory windows came shouts, cornet practise, and various moanings which, at a quieter time, would have been differentiated as vocal trios and duets. Down the business street, from the upper floors where some of the fraternities had rooms, the sounds of clanging piano rag-time tried to merge with explosive bellowings of happy, singing fraternity men. On the College Club porch a jostling crowd of students could be seen, shaking hands, telling summer experiences, and knocking chairs about in the anxiety to get at one another. The shop windows were gay with college banners, souvenirs, books, picture cards, college photographs, and sporting goods.
I found the furniture I had purchased from Garden heaped before my door and a half hour later I had it scattered lonesomely over the floor of my large room. From my open window I could look down on the stir of life on the campus. Night deepened, and with it came an increase, rather than a quieting of the noises, as if Youth were bound to have one last, gleesome frolic before the sedate masters of Books curbed their liberties. In the darkness of the night, sitting at the window, exactly as I had done at Evangelical University six years previously, I had an alien feeling as I listened to the sounds which soared up to my ears from the gloom below. Demon yells, demon howls of acute misery, throbbings of mandolin strings, the hoarse tooting of a fish horn, a piercing falsetto voice under my window trying to sing,