Drink her down, drink her down, drink her down, down, down!
Miss Storrs endeavored to convey with her glance, dignity, amusement, toleration of harmless sport, and a repudiation of the personality involved in the song; but it is to be doubted if even she was satisfied with the result. Theodora wished she had seen the President come in. She had been told how he walked solemnly across the hall, mounted the platform, unbuttoned his overcoat, and displayed two gorgeous rosettes of the conflicting colors—his official and exclusive privilege. And she had heard from the Team's retreat the thunder of applause that greeted this traditional rite. She wondered whether he cared who won: whether he realized what it was to play against a team that had beaten in its freshman year.
A burst of applause and laughter interrupted her meditations. She felt herself blushing—was it the Team? No: the sophomore Subs were escorting to the middle of the floor a child of five or six dressed in brightest emerald green: a child with a mane of the most remarkable brick-red hair in the world. She wore it in the fashion of Alice in Wonderland, and it grew redder and redder the longer one looked at it. She held a red ribbon of precisely the same shade in her hand, and at the middle of the floor the sophomores suddenly burst away from her and ran quickly to their seats, revealing at the end of the ribbon an enormous and lifelike green frog. The child stood for a moment twisting her little green legs undecidedly, and then, overcome with embarrassment at the appreciation she had evoked, shook her flaming locks over her face, and dragging the frog with her, sometimes on its side, sometimes on its head, fled to the sophomores, who bore her off in triumph.
"They got her in Williamsburgh," said somebody; "they've been hunting for weeks for a red-haired child, and that frog was from the drug store—oh, my dear, how perfectly darling!"
Alone and unabashed the freshman mascot took the floor. He was perhaps four years old and the color of a cake of chocolate. His costume was canary yellow—a perfect little jockey suit, with a purple band on his arm adorned with Ninety-yellow's class numerals. He dragged by a twisted cord of purple and yellow a most startling plum-colored terrier, of a shade that never was on land or sea, with a tendency to trip his master up at every step. In the exact middle of the floor the mascot paused, rolled his eyes till they seemed in danger of leaving their sockets, and then at a shrill whistle from the balcony pulled his yellow cap from his woolly head and made a deep and courtly bow to his patrons. But the storm of applause was more than he had been prepared for, and with a wild look about the hall and a frantic tug at the cord he dragged the purple and protesting animal to a corner of the room, where a grinning elder sister was stationed for his comfort.
Theodora's heart beat high: theirs was the best! Everybody was laughing and exclaiming and questioning; the very sophomores were shrieking at the efforts of the terrier to drag the little darkey out again; one member of the Faculty had laughed himself into something very like hysteria and giggled weakly at every twitch of the idiotic purple legs.
"It was Diamond Dyes," Theodora heard a freshman just above call out excitedly, "and Esther Armstrong thought of it. They dyed him every day for a week—"
The mascot and the dog had trotted up again, and as they ran back and the animal gave a more than ordinarily vicious dart, the poor little boy, yielding suddenly, sat down with exquisite precision on his companion, and with distended eyes wailed aloud for his relative, who disentangled him with difficulty and bore him away, his cap over his ear and his little chocolate hands clutching her neck. In the comparative silence that followed the gale of laughter some bustle and conference was noticed on the sophomore side, and suddenly the leader rose, lifting her green and red stick, and the front line of sophomores and seniors intoned with great distinctness this thrilling doggerel:
I never saw a purple pup:
I never hoped to see one: