Harry rattled on purposely about the first thing that came into his head, for he noticed his aunt seemed slightly embarrassed. She was going to New Haven to take care of James and himself, and naturally she did not care to divulge the real reason to him. Well, she was a dear old thing, certainly; he remembered how she had acted on his mother's death. He was suddenly sorry that he had seen nothing of her for the last seven years, and sorry that he had written her so irregularly during his absence. It was pleasant to think that he would have a chance to make up for it in the future.
CHAPTER VIII
LIVY AND VICTOR HUGO
On a certain Wednesday evening late in September Harry stood on a certain street-corner in the city of New Haven. Surging about him were a thousand or so youths of his own age or a little older, most of them engaged in making noises expressive of the pleasures of reunion. It was a merry and turbulent scene. Tall, important-looking seniors, wearing white sweaters with large blue Y's on their chests, moved through the crowd with a worried air, apparently trying to organize something that had no idea whatever of being organized. They were ineffectual, but oh, so splendid! Harry, who had almost no friends of his own there to talk to, watched them with undisguised admiration. He reflected that James would be one of their number a year hence, and wondered if by any chance he himself would be one three years from now.
Just as he dismissed the probability as negligible, a sort of order became felt among those who stood immediately about him. Men stopped talking and appeared to be listening to something which Harry could not hear. Then they all began shouting a strange, unmeaning succession of syllables in concert; Harry recognized this as a cheer and lustily joined in with it. At the end came a number; repeated three times; a number which no one present had ever before heard bellowed forth from three or four hundred brazen young throats; a number that had a strange and unfamiliar sound, even to those who shouted it, and caused the upperclassmen to break into a derisive jeer.
A new class had officially started its career, and Harry was part of it. No one flushed more hotly than he at the jeer of the upperclassmen; no one jeered back with greater spirit when the sophomores cheered for their own class. No one took part more joyfully in the long and varied program of events that filled out the rest of the evening. The parade through the streets of the town was to him a joyous bacchanal, and the wrestling matches on the Campus a splendid orgy. After these were over even more enjoyable things happened, for James, with two or three fellow-juniors—magnificent, Olympian beings!—took him in tow and escorted him safe and unmolested through the turbulent region of York Street, where freshmen, who had nothing save honor to fight for, were pressed into organized hostility against sophomores, who didn't even have that.
"Well, what did you think of it all?" asked James later.
"Oh, ripping," said Harry, "I never thought it would be anything like this. We never really saw anything of the real life of the college when we lived in town here, did we?"
"Not much. It all seems pretty strange to you now, I suppose, but you'll soon get onto the ropes and feel at home. What sort of a schedule did you get?"