Santa Benicia Military Academy, California. It is a peaceful, beautiful place, with no signs of hurrying tetrahedrals or busy Army Boards. White and purple figs overhang the walk to the main building, and beside it there are little stretches of grass, shaded by orange trees, or tulip trees filled with great white blossoms. Keep along the walk, and you come to the Yard, surrounded by vine-covered dormitories. Beyond the Yard are the stretches of the athletic field and parade ground. Everywhere are palms, and grape vines, and giant roses. A beautiful place, and an ideal school for boys. For, even though it is a military academy, there are practically no rules. The students are expected to be gentlemen—there are no “bounds,” almost no “hours.”
Messrs. Hike Griffin and Poodle Darby trotted through the Yard gate, their arms about each other’s shoulders, singing the newly revised class song:
“We stung ’em, see? we stung ’em, see?
Oh, the Jun-i-ors are wild.”
They were trying to look peacefully happy. But they were not happy in the least. Poodle put it right when he said they felt like clams who had strayed out of their rivers and gotten fried, and then tried to go back to the mud and pretend they’d never seen a stove.
For every chap who passed them, except for the new Freshmen, shouted something like this: “Hello, aviators. Brought your airyplane? When do I get a ride?”
Poodle admitted that they felt “like digging a hole and crawling into it, and pulling the hole in after them,” when the great Pink Eye Morrison, president of the Senior Class, and baseball-captain, stopped, raised his school cap to them, and remarked:
“It isest a great honor you doest us poor slobs, O thou Griffin and thou Darby in the vocative, to visit us in the midst of—”
“Oh, please cheese it,” begged Hike, and Pink Eye passed on, with an unholy smile.
That is but a sample of what they got, not only from the Juniors and Seniors, but even from their own classmates. It had been a joy, in the morning, to drop their suit-cases on the grass, and yell at their old friends of the year before, but by afternoon, they felt like keeping to their rooms. It looked as if they were going to have a horrible year, as if everything they said or did would be laughed at, as coming from “the aviators.” They wished, for a while, that they had never seen an aeroplane.