That night as he stood at his bureau and looked into the eyes of the past, at Mimi and Dolly and Jennie and Vivi the hunter of scalps, he spoke.
"Snorky?"
"What is it, old boy?"
"You betcha."
"Do you know the feeling after you've been dabbling with six-inch and five-inch and four-inch trout all day,—and something about three feet long weighing ten or twelve pounds grabs your hook? Do you get me?"
"Sure, I get you," said Snorky gazing heavily out at the stars, "but oh gee, Skippy, why does she have to be Nuisance's sister?"
Snorky's worst forebodings were realized. Nuisance earned his title a hundredfold within the week. Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan had been fresh, was fresh and would freshen more, but Dennis was amusing and added to the gayety of nations. Nuisance was what his name implied, simply intolerable. You stumbled over him and you bumped into him. When state secrets were being discussed in whispers, Nuisance was always within earshot. He was the extra, the intruder, the tail to the kite. He did not actively offend against the traditions which govern freshmen in the incubator period. He was too clever for that. He had submitted to the mild hazing with a cheerfulness which robbed it of all its sting. He had climbed water towers and sung appropriate hymns. He had sat in washbasins and gravely pulled imaginary miles against the toothpicks furnished him as oars. He had submitted to the pi's as they came with a full recognition that the second and third men in the mounting heap were extremely more uncomfortable than himself with a mattress for a vis-à-vis. He was not insubordinate—he was just a nuisance.
But if he kept skilfully within the letter of the law so far as the rest of the house was concerned he was irrepressible once in the company of Skippy. Nothing that Skippy could do could chill his affection or bring him to a proper realization of the deference which should mark the manner of a freshman towards one of the lords of the earth.