GIFT OF 
 Prof. C. A. Kofold 
 
THE WAYS OF YALE 
 
 IN THE 
 
 CONSULSHIP OF PLANCUS 
 
By HENRY A. BEERS. 
 
 1st Buckram Series, idrno, with frontt* 
 pieces, 75 cents each. 
 
 THE WAYS OF YALE, ( 7 tb Ed.) 
 
 In the Consulship of Plancus. Humor- 
 ous Sketches, 
 
 ** Yale is to be congratulated upon having sucfc 
 * writer on her campus. So many rankly unjuat 
 and superficial books have been written on Va! 
 ways, that such a book as the present one is 
 refreshing innovation." Yale Literary X- 
 
 ** There is only one fault to find, and t 
 there is not enough of it." New York Tir- 
 
 "A felicitous capture of the elusive \\ 
 graduate spirit . . . mingled with the uprc. 
 numor which iostles the sentimental so <:.' 
 in college life. Springfield Republican. 
 
 ** This royally entertaining booklet." /,-.. 
 pendent. 
 
 A SUBURBAN PASTORAL, 
 
 (5*h Edition.) And Five Other Tales 
 of American Life, and Two Old Eng- 
 lish Legends, 
 
 < No collection of short stories by an America* 
 writer, lately published, has made a more enter- 
 taining book." N. K. Times. 
 
 " [*A Suburban Pastoral '] so devoid of preten- 
 aion or effort, so freshly and frankly written, so 
 quiet in its humor, arid with its> suggestion of 
 pathos so latent in the emotions it awakens . . . 
 hereafter we shall remember him among th* 
 sweetest, tenderest, and gravest of our story- 
 tel lers . ' ' Ma il a nd Express. 
 
 " 'A Midwinter Night's Dream ' is a beautiful 
 example of writing which is permeated with deli- 
 cate fancy. . . ' Split Zephyrs ' discusses many 
 of those problems which you will hear debater 
 Imost every night in June under the elms and m 
 old college haunts." Life, 
 
 HENRY HOLT & CO., New York, 
 
^H^W^f 
 
 ' It crowed repeatedly and attracted the attention of 
 the authorities.' 1 '' P. 144. 
 
THE WAYS OF YALE 
 
 CONSULSHIP OF PLANCUS 
 
 HENRY A. BEERS 
 
 t/ 
 
 AUTHOR OF " A SUBURBAN PASTORAL," KTC 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1895 
 
In fallow college days, Tom Harland, 
 
 We both have known the ways of Yale, 
 And talked of many a nigh and far land, 
 
 O'er many a famous tap of ale. 
 There still they sing their " Gaudeamus," 
 
 And see the road to glory clear ; 
 But taps that in our day were famous 
 
 Have given place to Lager Bier. 
 
 The Ballad of Lager Bier. STEDMAN. 
 
 THE MEESHON COMPANY PRESS, 
 RAHWAY, N. J. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 fln tbe 2>a$s of tbe tfence. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CONSULE PLANCO, . . . viii 
 SOME CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE 
 IN THE LAST QUARTER CEN- 
 TURY, . . . i 
 JUBILEE ODE PROLOG IM HIM- 
 
 MEL, 18 
 
 THE THIMBLES, ... 22 
 
 CHUMS, 36 
 
 EATING-CLUBS, . . . 100 
 LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF AN 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE, . .133 
 
 Recreations of tbe 1ftet> %etter Club. 
 AD IULUM ANTONIUM, . . 168 
 
 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA, . . 169 
 " OUR OWN PERCIVAL," . .184 
 BIFTEK AUX CHAMPIGNONS, . 203 
 WHAT'S IN A NAME ? 208 
 
 THE SPRINGALD AND THE CAUDA 
 
 GALLI, .... 209 
 AMOURS PASSAGERS, . . .213 
 IMPRESSIONS OF A SUB-FRESHMAN, 215 
 
 IVltlMoS 
 
IN THE DAYS OF 
 THE FENCE 
 
CONSULE PLANCO. 
 
 In Plancus' days, when life was slow, 
 We dwelt within the Old Brick Row 
 Before Durfee or Welch was built, 
 Or gilded youths in Vanderbilt 
 Looked down upon the mob below. 
 Then Freshmen did not use to go 
 'Most every evening to the show ; 
 Quite inexpensive was our gilt 
 
 In Plancus' days. 
 
 We had no football then, you know : 
 All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, 
 No gore was shed, no ink was spilt, 
 No poet got upon his stilt 
 To write these frenchified rondeaux, 
 In Plancus' clays, 
 
THE WAYS OF YALE 
 
 SOME CHANGES IN COL- 
 LEGE LIFE IN THE LAST 
 QUARTER CENTURY. 
 
 I1HERE are stories of 
 men who have left col- 
 lege, halfway through 
 their course, and come back 
 many years after to pick up 
 the broken threads, drawn by 
 haunting memories of the 
 charm of student life. But, 
 rushing once more to prayers 
 at the sound of the same old 
 bell, or seated again in class- 
 room on the familiar benches, 
 
2 CSS A N<GES t 7,y COL LEGE LIFE. 
 
 though' with a new set of faces 
 ci;ro ( and; ;thern;, they have ex- 
 
 ,'penenced, , : a 1 ' 'strange disap- 
 pointment : have found that 
 identical conditions do not 
 bring back the identical feel- 
 ings, and that, in spite of all, 
 they 
 
 " . . . never could recapture 
 The first fine careless rapture." 
 
 Not so very different from 
 this is the experience of the tu- 
 tor who returns to the academic 
 life after two or three years' 
 absence. Perhaps he takes a 
 room in the same entry where 
 he lived in his Senior year ; and 
 as he sits by his window of a 
 summer evening, and hears the 
 well-known strains of " The 
 Old Mountain Tree," or " The 
 Son of a Gambolier " rising 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 3 
 
 from the fence, the impulse 
 seizes him to wander out to the 
 corner and take his seat on the 
 top rail. Will he not find all 
 the old crowd there as usual ? 
 It was only the other evening 
 that they were there. Or when 
 the college row is lighted up at 
 night, how natural to pause 
 under Bob's window in the 
 third-story ffont of South Mid- 
 dle and call up, as of yore, 
 "Oh, Bob!" forgetting that 
 Bob is no longer within hail, and 
 that he himself is " out of it/' 
 A comparison of student life 
 in the sixties and in the nine- 
 ties, by one who had lived it at 
 both eras, would be most inter- 
 esting. The present writer has 
 been so long out of touch with 
 the undergraduate world that 
 all he can do is to compare his 
 
4 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 recollections of that life as it 
 was then, with his guess of 
 what it may be now. Certain 
 changes in the external or, so 
 to speak, institutional features 
 of the college microcosm are 
 obvious to anyone who will 
 contrast the Yale of to-day 
 with the Yale described by my 
 classmate, the u Graduate of 
 '69," in his " Four Years at 
 Yale/* There is the Wooden 
 Spoon, for instance, which used 
 to cause so many heart-burn- 
 ings. That is gone, with its 
 Spoon Exhibition, its Prome- 
 nade Concert, its Cock Suppers, 
 and the rest. The idea of 
 deciding by vote who was the 
 best fellow, or the most popu- 
 lar man in the class, was an 
 essentially vulgar one, and the 
 choice was seldom spontaneous, 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 5 
 
 but was manipulated in the 
 interest of coalitions between 
 the Junior societies. 
 
 I do not know whether the 
 thing called " Junior politics," 
 or even whether society politics 
 in general, exists nowadays. 
 There was a certain amount of 
 excitement and fun about it. 
 There were men who devoted 
 their whole attention to it, and 
 who looked upon the Faculty 
 and the curriculum of study as 
 existing merely for the sake of 
 the society system and the dis- 
 tribution of class offices and 
 honors. The Faculty kept up 
 a sort of routine which imposed 
 upon the outside world, but 
 their true function was to main- 
 tain a chessboard upon which 
 the youthful politicians could 
 make their moves and combi- 
 
6 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 nations. What else was the 
 college for ? Here was its real 
 field of action. Hie patet in- 
 genuis campus. (We did not 
 use to call it " Campus," by the 
 way, but " Yard.") To serious 
 men, college politics, though 
 not without amusing aspects, 
 was childish nonsense, and, 
 upon the whole, a nuisance and 
 a bore. 
 
 The Spoon Exhibition, held 
 in Music Hall, was usually 
 a rather flat performance. A 
 much more stalwart affair was 
 the Thanksgiving Jubilee in 
 Alumni Hall, with its sermon, 
 its merrie minstrelsie, clog 
 dances, and fun galore. It was 
 a rough, hearty, noisy, charac- 
 teristically Yale show, and 
 could it have been kept within 
 bounds, had elements in it 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 7 
 
 worth saving. Attempts were 
 made to regulate it, and a cen- 
 sorship committee attended the 
 rehearsals ; but all was in 
 vain.* Probably the license 
 that distinguished the old Jubi- 
 lee was an inseparable part of 
 it, for when it was revived by 
 the New York Alumni for a 
 series of years, the same odor 
 not of sanctity still hung 
 about it. 
 
 Another institution that has 
 gone gone with "voice of 
 weeping heard and loud la- 
 ment," and with spasmodic ex- 
 periments at revival is the 
 open societies. In the days of 
 which I write (1865-69) these 
 were still existent, but hardly 
 alive. Their annual prize de- 
 
 * See Jubilee Ode Prolog in Himmel, 
 p. 10. 
 
8 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 bates were hotly contested, 
 though they were not proper- 
 ly debates, but set speeches, 
 memorized and declaimed. On 
 these occasions the halls and 
 staircases were crowded, and 
 the fortunate winners were 
 borne off in triumph on the 
 shoulders of their friends to ex- 
 pend their prize money and 
 generally a good deal more 
 than their prize money in 
 little suppers. But the regular 
 weekly meetings were slimly 
 attended, and a story ran about 
 a certain Brother-in-Unity, who, 
 fired by an editorial in the Lit. 
 on the duty of rallying to the 
 support of the open societies, 
 found his way one Wednesday 
 evening into Linonia Hall and 
 made a patriotic speech about 
 the ancient glory of Brothers, 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 9 
 
 amid the ironical cheers of the 
 dozen Linonians who happened 
 to be present. 
 
 But space would fail me to tell 
 of all the customs that have 
 gone by the board, to be suc- 
 ceeded by others which have 
 changed the whole outward 
 face of college society. I say 
 outward, for doubtless in es- 
 sence the thing remains much 
 the same. The most striking 
 feature of recent undergraduate 
 life is its intense, and perhaps 
 slightly excessive, devotion to 
 athletic sports. In 1865, the 
 only department of athletics al- 
 ready well developed was boat- 
 ing. Rugby football had not 
 been introduced, though faint 
 rumors had come down to us 
 of the old games on the green 
 in which the Sophomores and 
 
10 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 Freshmen kicked en masse, and 
 which were put down by the 
 Faculty in 1857. My own 
 class, in its Freshman year, was 
 the first to put a baseball nine 
 in the field ; and I believe that 
 the University nine was not 
 formed till 1868. I fancy that 
 there was something a little 
 impromptu about those early 
 matches, anyway, and that, 
 when a challenge was received, 
 from Harvard or elsewhere, a 
 nine was hastily extemporized 
 to go out to Hamilton Park 
 and play the visitors. 
 
 Connected with this develop- 
 ment of athletics is another 
 peculiarity of contemporary 
 student life which impresses 
 the returning graduate : the 
 degree, viz., to which that life 
 is organized. The number of 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. II 
 
 clubs and organizations of all 
 kinds II -ted in a modern Ban- 
 ner is something wonderful : 
 glee ciubs, chess clubs, rifle 
 clubs, whist clubs, yacht clubs, 
 Yale orchestras, Yale unions, 
 University clubs, track athletic 
 associations, banjo clubs, tennis 
 clubs, Andover clubs, Ohio 
 clubs, Berkeley societies, etc., 
 etc.; most of them all un- 
 dreamed of in the simple struc- 
 ture of undergraduate life in the 
 sixties. There were the secret 
 societies, to be sure, too many 
 of them, but outside of these, 
 our amusements, occupations, 
 and social life were left to pur- 
 sue their own route. It some- 
 times seems to me I speak 
 under correction and from an 
 outside point of view but it 
 sometimes seems as if a certain 
 
12 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 accidental, spontaneous charm 
 had gone out of college life ; as 
 if everyone was enrolled in 
 some organization or o'-her, was 
 in training for something, and 
 carried on his amusements 
 strenuously and in a corporate 
 way. But very likely this is a 
 wrong impression, the view of 
 an onlooker and a laudator tern- 
 poris acti. I am told that even 
 the Sophomore and Freshman 
 rushes are now organized and 
 take place on the Grammar 
 School lot at a set time and 
 under rules. Consult 7 Pianco, 
 a rush was an impulsive and 
 unforeseen thing and liable to 
 happen anywhere and any 
 time ; on Chapel Street, in the 
 College Yard, in the post office 
 or wherever a group of Sopho- 
 mores encountered a group of 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 13 
 
 Freshmen and the joy of battle 
 took possession of them. If 
 there are to be rushes, of course 
 the modern plan is much the 
 better. When we wanted exer- 
 cise we were very apt to take 
 it in an unsystematic way, in 
 small walking, rowing, and sail- 
 ing parties. The gymnasium 
 was largely given over to Fresh- 
 men and to men training for 
 the crews. But every fair 
 Wednesday and Saturday after- 
 noon saw knots of men, from 
 four to half a dozen, setting 
 out with their walking sticks, 
 to explore the country about 
 New Haven : Light House 
 Point, and the old fort, Lake 
 Saltonstall, Rabbit Mountain, 
 and the North Haven meadows, 
 Cedar Hill, Wintergreen Falls, 
 and all the Rocks, Edgewood, 
 
14 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 Maltby Park, and the west 
 shore. In Senior year walking 
 was combined with a certain 
 amount of botanizing and geolo- 
 gizing, and we found a guide in 
 a very pleasant set of papers 
 which Professor James D. Dana 
 published, for the direction of 
 student walkers, in the old Col- 
 lege Courant. We used to go 
 to the woods, as the present 
 generation of undergraduates 
 go to the Yale Field or the 
 tennis courts. There were 
 others, of course, who spent 
 their holidays in billiards or 
 poker, or in talking college 
 politics, and some who took 
 their degrees without ever go- 
 ing so far afield as East Rock 
 or the Judge's Cave. 
 
 There was no yacht club in 
 those days, but there were 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 15 
 
 some persistent sailors in sum- 
 mer term, Cras ingens itera- 
 bimus cequor was our motto, 
 and we dreamed of voyages 
 as far east as Montauk. But 
 our Hercules' Pillar in that 
 direction always remained the 
 Thimble Islands, where we 
 camped out in that halcyon 
 season known as " Senior vaca- 
 tion," which formerly inter- 
 vened between Presentation 
 and Commencement. Tem- 
 porary, informal clubs for 
 mixed social and literary pur- 
 poses exist, I suppose, now as 
 they did then. One such I 
 remember and it is one of 
 my pleasantest memories of 
 college days which was 
 started in Sophomore year 
 and continued to meet, irreg- 
 ularly and at convenience, all 
 
1 6 CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. 
 
 through the remainder of the 
 course. 
 
 There was still a certain 
 roughness about college life in 
 the late sixties. The era of 
 Bully clubs, pow-wows, burials 
 of Euclid, town and gown rows, 
 had indeed gone by, and it was 
 no longer thought good form 
 to play pranks upon the 
 Faculty. The annual burning 
 of the North coal yard was a 
 survival of that earlier Pliocene 
 age. I cannot determine how 
 far the class spirit and the Yale 
 democracy have yielded to 
 the more comfortable condi- 
 tions of modern student life. 
 Probably men in college spend 
 more money than they used. 
 There was but one man in my 
 class who kept a saddle-horse, 
 and none who owned a yacht 
 
CHANGES IN COLLEGE LIFE. I? 
 
 or dog-cart. There is no rea- 
 son why college life should be 
 rough or unrefined, but there 
 are many reasons why it should 
 be simple and plain. The 
 glory of youth is independent 
 of luxury. And it is the pe- 
 culiar charm of academic life 
 that its amusements, even, 
 have, or ought to have, an intel- 
 lectual touch about them, a 
 constant reference to " the 
 things of the mind." 
 
JUBILEE ODE PROLOG IM 
 HIMMEL 
 
 HERE'S been no jubilee that 
 
 I've attended, 
 
 But something calculated 
 to offend the most fastidious was 
 there : 
 No minstrel show, however watched 
 
 and tended, 
 
 But some bad joke had share 
 Some grind, Jew desperate, duplicate 
 
 intended, 
 
 Enough to raise the hair 
 Upon the oldest living graduate's 
 
 head 
 
 (Though parenthetically be it said 
 I'm told the oldest living graduate's 
 
 dead) : 
 
 Jokes bad enough to draw Podsnap- 
 per's curse on 
 a 
 
JUBILEE ODE. 19 
 
 The show, and bring a blush to the 
 cheek of a young person. 
 
 Sometimes, when roused to spirit of 
 repartee, 
 
 The end man spared not in his ghoul- 
 ish glee, 
 
 Or age, or sex, or even the Faculty. 
 
 What should be done ? They met. 
 They said " Go to : 
 
 Let us appoint a censor who shall 
 view 
 
 Each jest beforehand. Eke thereto 
 he shall 
 
 Be present at the merry rehearsal, 
 
 To crush whatever poison snake may 
 lurk 
 
 'Neath flowers of wit ambiguous, quip 
 or quirk." 
 
 The judge hath paced into the hall, 
 
 Red as a rose is he ; 
 Nodding their heads before him goes 
 
 The nigger minstrelsy. 
 
 He listens with a patient smile 
 Till all the grinds are done. 
 
 " This seems indeed to me," he says, 
 " To be quite harmless fun. 
 
20 JUBILEE ODE. 
 
 " But will you please expound again 
 The point of that last pun." 
 
 Then up and spake the merry end 
 
 man, 
 " In sooth it shall be done." 
 
 " Well, go ahead, we'll sample 
 The remainder of the show, 
 
 Which, I repeat, seems innocent 
 Thus far, though rather slow." 
 
 So through the programme, until 
 
 naught remained, 
 Each doubtful point was questioned 
 
 and explained. 
 Three hours went by four five : the 
 
 tired spectator 
 Scrawled o'er the whole his desperate 
 
 And fled the scene ; and to himself 
 
 said he : 
 
 " If ever more I serve as Jubilee 
 Committee, judge, or censor, let me 
 
 be 
 
 Anathema : these subtle equivoques, 
 These double-headed, amphisbsenic 
 
 jokes, 
 
JUBILEE ODE. 21 
 
 Unto a plain, blunt man are blacker 
 mysteries 
 
 Than the conundrums in the Class- 
 day histories 
 
 Are to the victim's lady friends : in 
 vain 
 
 They call on Fred or Willy to explain 
 
 Those passages in his biography 
 
 Which lightly touched, can wake such 
 boisterous glee 
 
 That the leaves tremble on the tall 
 elm tree." 
 
 Thus, lurking where some traverse 
 lent its screen, 
 
 Yearly the puzzled censor might be 
 seen 
 
 Watching the jokes and wondering 
 what they meant. 
 
 In look and gesture proudly eminent, 
 
 Thence issuing, with magisterial 
 frown, 
 
 He stopped the sermon, called the 
 ballet down, 
 
 Or withered with rebuke the Rabe- 
 laisian clown. 
 
THE THIMBLES. 
 
 VERYONE who has 
 been through college 
 knows that the real life 
 of the place is not to be found 
 in Commencement Orations, or 
 Wooden-Spoon exhibitions, or 
 Freshman u rushes "; nor even 
 at Springfield regattas and 
 Hamilton Park matches. These 
 are only its showy and boister- 
 ous croppings out, which get 
 into the newspapers and form 
 the commonplaces of conver- 
 sation in college society. The 
 genuine academic life is of finer, 
 quieter, and more enduring 
 essence. It is to be found in 
 
THE THIMBLES. 23 
 
 the daily routine of pleasant 
 study ; in the life of chums ; 
 in the informal meetings of 
 small reading parties or literary 
 clubs ; ,in summer walks and 
 sails ; and in vacation visits to 
 the homes of classmates. This 
 life is barren of incident, and 
 yet its sameness is not monoto- 
 nous. It is almost domestic 
 in its simplicity, and yet the 
 adventurous spirit of youth, 
 the glow of early friendships, 
 and the intellectual atmosphere 
 which it breathes give it the 
 charm of romance. Its appro- 
 priate expression must be 
 sought in fiction and poetry 
 not in books of dry, statistical 
 information. 
 
 What are the scenes and 
 the moments to which a Yale 
 man's memory turns back most 
 
24 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 fondly when he thinks of his 
 college days ? We venture to 
 say that the smell of wood- 
 smoke in his nostrils, and the 
 snap of hickory sticks in his ear, 
 will inevitably bring up the 
 group that sat one night around 
 the old Franklin in South Mid- 
 dle, and watched the firelight 
 flicker on the beam that sagged 
 across the low ceiling. They 
 sat deep into the night, and 
 read deeply in each other's souls, 
 and present and future looked 
 as rosy as their curling pipe- 
 smoke. How readily, under 
 such a genial forcing-process, 
 
 " doth the heart unclose 
 Its formal calyx of pretenses, 
 Which shut against rude day's offenses, 
 And open its shy midnight rose " ! 
 
 Or he will remember one 
 night going into his coal-closet 
 
THE THIMBLES. 25 
 
 with a candle, and suddenly 
 seeing, whittled on the inside 
 of the rude door, a name that 
 makes the heart beat. And, 
 setting down his candle, he feels 
 himself for an instant the chum 
 j of greatness, and the homely 
 room becomes " a feasting pres- 
 ence full of light." 
 
 Recall that June evening 
 when you loitered up Temple 
 Street, in mingled moonshine 
 and elm-shadow, and in the 
 breath of mignonette from the 
 dusky gardens, and the sound 
 of ladies' voices from some un- 
 seen piazza, you caught a sense 
 of the past something from 
 Willis or " our own Percival," 
 and the days of serenades and 
 sentiment. 
 
 The scenery about New 
 Haven very various, and 
 
26 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 richly wooded for the neigh- 
 borhood of so large a town- 
 leaves indelible impressions on 
 all college walkers. Two ridges 
 or dykes of trap end in the fine 
 precipices known as East and 
 West Rock, each about two 
 miles from the university. 
 These with their intermediate 
 spurs look over the plain in 
 which the city lies. They are 
 covered with a growth of red 
 cedar and juniper. Past the 
 foot of each flows a creek bor- 
 dered by a narrow strip of salt 
 marsh, the hay-stacks on which 
 have been aptly compared by 
 Dr. Holmes to billiard-balls ly- 
 ing about on their tables. The 
 creeks run into a harbor long 
 and narrow, whose entrance is 
 guarded by a point of rocks, 
 jutting out boldly from the 
 
THE THIMBLES. 27 
 
 groves behind and carrying a 
 lighthouse on its back. When 
 the day is clear, you can see 
 from East Rock the white caps 
 beyond the Light, and across 
 the Sound the line of the Long 
 Island sand bluffs. How many 
 a September saunter we remem- 
 ber over the woody Fair Haven 
 hills when the barberries were 
 turning red ! How many a 
 draught of the small, small beer 
 at the cheerful toll-gate on the 
 Woodbridge Pike ! How many 
 a lazy spring day whittle on the 
 beach at Morris Cove, under 
 the row of half-dead Lombardy 
 poplars, watching the ripples 
 curling in over the sand ! Here 
 the vernal impulse would seize 
 us, prompting Homeric voyages 
 to the Thimbles, and making us 
 impatient for the return of those 
 
28 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 summer midnights when, in the 
 deadest of calms, we should 
 float up the bay on a flood-tide 
 toward " White's," trying to 
 discover by the phosphores- 
 cence in the wake, and by our 
 scarcely receding cigar-smoke 
 as it rose to the stars, whether 
 our rudder was making any 
 progress through the water. 
 
 The Thimbles used to be a 
 favorite haunt. These are a 
 group of forty islands in the 
 Sound, some ten miles east of 
 the Light. They were a 
 famous stamping-ground of 
 Captain Kidd, and are fairly 
 classic with traditions of that 
 secretive buccaneer. A bayou 
 opening by a narrow passage 
 into High Island is called 
 Kidd's Harbor. There, says 
 the legend, he lay perdu while 
 
THE THIMBLES. 29 
 
 His Majesty's cruisers sailed 
 past the entrance. One of 
 those oval depressions in the 
 rocks, known to geologists as 
 " pot-holes," is called Kidd's 
 Punch Bowl. A rusty iron ring 
 and staple in the cliff is sup- 
 posed to have held the cable of 
 his galley. On Money Island 
 luxuriant crops of the Stinking 
 Herb Robert have sprung up in 
 spots even recently dug over by 
 treasure-seekers. 
 
 The very flora of the Thimbles 
 is unique and tropically weird. 
 The cat-tails in the brackish 
 marshes grow to a monstrous 
 size ; so do the joints of the 
 prickly-pear cactus, whose yel- 
 low blossoms bask over the 
 sunny rocks where we used to 
 race young sand-snipe. I won- 
 der if that old pair of boots 
 
30 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 which Punde^son left on the 
 top of Gull Rock as a sacrifice 
 to the Venti are standing there 
 yet. They were the last thing 
 we saw, boldly outlined against 
 the crimson eastern sky, on the 
 morning when we said good- 
 by to the Thimbles. 
 
 ',Oh, messmates of the Triton 
 and the Eddy ! most of us are 
 a good many miles inland now. 
 Some of us have trifled with 
 our digestions ; all of us, doubt- 
 less, have lost the unquestion- 
 ing appetites of early youth. 
 But shall we ever forget ye, 
 nodes coenceque deum ? For- 
 get ye, nectar and ambrosia, 
 coffee and clam-chowder, blue- 
 fish and lobster, partaken of at 
 every point of that well-known 
 coast ; at Half Mile Island and 
 Branford Point; at Double 
 
THE THIMBLES. 31 
 
 Beach and Pine Orchard ; at 
 Dickerman's and at Stony 
 Creek ? And where not ? 
 
 The following, which was 
 written in those lotus-eating 
 days, may or may not describe 
 a true occurrence. But well, 
 strange things have happened 
 at the Thimbles. 
 
 THE MERMAID'S GLASS. 
 
 'Twas down among the Thimble Isles, 
 That strew for many liquid miles 
 The waters of Long Island Sound. 
 Our yacht lay in a cove ; around 
 The rocky isles with cedars green 
 And channels winding in between ; 
 And here a low, black reef was spread, 
 And there a sunken " nigger-head " 
 Dimpled the surface of the tide. 
 From one tall island's cliffy side 
 We heard the shaggy goats that fed. 
 The gulls wheeled screaming overhead 
 Or settled in a snowy flock 
 Far out upon the lonely rock 
 
32 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 Which, like a pillar, seemed to show 
 Some drowned acropolis below. 
 Meanwhile, in the warm sea about, 
 With many a plunge and jolly shout, 
 Our crew enjoyed their morning bath. 
 The hairy skipper in his wrath 
 Lay cursing on the gunwale's rim ; 
 He loved a dip, but could not swim ; 
 So, now and then with plank afloat, 
 He'd struggle feebly round the boat 
 And o'er the side climb puffing in, 
 Scraping wide areas off his skin, 
 Then lie and sun each hirsute limb 
 Once more upon the gunwale's rim, 
 And shout, with curses unavailing : 
 * ' Come out ! There's wind : let's do 
 
 some sailing ! " 
 
 A palm-leaf hat, that here and there 
 Bobbed on the water, showed him where 
 Some venturous swimmer, outward bound, 
 Escaped beyond his voice's sound. 
 All heedless of their skipper's call, 
 One group fought for the upset yawl. 
 The conqueror sat astride the keel 
 And deftly pounded with his heel 
 The hands that clutched his citadel, 
 Which showed at distance like the shell 
 Round which, unseen, the naiad train 
 Sport naked in the middle main. 
 
THE THIMBLES. 33 
 
 Myself had drifted far away, 
 Meanwhile, from where the sail-boat lay, 
 Till all unbroken I could hear 
 The waves' low whisper in my ear, 
 And at the level of mine eye 
 The blue vibration met the sky. 
 Sometimes upon my back I lay 
 And watched the clouds, while I and 
 
 they 
 
 Were wafted effortless along 
 Sudden I seemed to hear a song : 
 Yet not a song, but some weird strain 
 As though the inarticulate main 
 Had found a voice whose human tone 
 Interpreted its own dull moan ; 
 Its foamy hiss ; its surfy roar ; 
 Its gentle lapping on the shore ; 
 Its noise of subterranean waves 
 That grumble in the sea-cliff caves ; 
 Its whish among the drifting miles 
 Of gulf-wind from the Indian Isles 
 All all the harmonies were there 
 Which ocean makes with earth or air. 
 Turning I saw a sunken ledge 
 Bared by the ebb, along whose edge 
 The matted sea-weed dripped : thereon, 
 Betwixt the dazzle of the sun 
 And the blue shimmer of the sea, 
 I saw or else I seemed to see 
 
34 THE THIMBLES. 
 
 A mermaid, crooning a wild song ; 
 Combing with arm uplifted long 
 The hair that shed its meshes black 
 Down the slope whiteness of her back. 
 She held a mirror in her hand, 
 Wherein she viewed sky, sea and land 
 Tier beauty's background and its frame. 
 Bat now, as toward the rock I came, 
 All suddenly across the glass 
 Some startling image seemed to pass ; 
 For her song rose into a scream, 
 Over her shoulders one swift gleam 
 Of eyes unearthly fell on me, 
 And, 'twixt the flashing of the sea 
 And the blind dazzle of the sun, 
 I saw the rock, but thereupon 
 She sat no longer 'gainst the blue ; 
 Only across the reef there flew 
 One snow-white tern and vanished too. 
 But, coasting that lone island round, 
 Among the slippery kelp I found 
 A little oval glass that lay 
 Upturned and flashing in the ray 
 Of the down-looking sun. Thereto 
 With scarce believing eyes I drew 
 And took it captive. 
 
 A while there 
 I rested in the mermaid's lair, 
 
THE THIMBLES. 35 
 
 And felt the merry breeze that blew 
 And watched the sharpies as they flew, 
 And snuffed the sea's breath thick with 
 
 brine, 
 And basked me in the sun's warm 
 
 shine ; 
 
 Then with my prize I made my way 
 Once more to where the sail-boat lay. 
 I kept the secret and the glass ; 
 By day across its surface pass 
 The transient shapes of common things 
 Which chance within its oval brings. 
 But when at night I strive to sound 
 The darkness of its face profound, 
 Again I seem to hear the breeze 
 That curls the waves on summer seas ; 
 I see the isles with cedars green ; 
 The channels winding in between ; 
 The coves with beaches of white sand ; 
 The reefs where warning spindles stand ; 
 And, through the multitudinous shimmer 
 Of waves and sun, again the glimmer 
 Of eyes unearthly falls on me, 
 Deep with the mystery of the sea. 
 
CHUMS. 
 
 1 H ERE is often a tender- 
 ness beyond common 
 friendship in the life of 
 college chums ; a domestic and 
 almost conjugal relation springs 
 from their little housekeeping. 
 Yet chumlock, like wedlock, 
 is a lottery. I even knew a 
 Junior whose experience had 
 been so unlucky that at last, in 
 a fit of cynical desperation, he 
 advertised for a roommate. 
 The advertisement was in- 
 serted under " Matrimonial " in 
 the College C our ant, and bul- 
 letined in the university drug- 
 store. It was answered ; but 
 36 
 
CHUMS. 3V 
 
 the saying about college was 
 that Robinson had advertised 
 for a chum in an apothecary's 
 shop and had got a////. 
 
 My Freshman chum was 
 from Illinois, though there was 
 nothing about him to suggest 
 the broad prairies of the West. 
 On the contrary, he was nig- 
 gling, anxious, near-sighted; 
 yet absent-minded withal so 
 absent-minded, in fact, that 
 once when he started to throw 
 a suit of clothes into his bureau 
 drawer and at the same instant 
 to spit in the fire, he spat in the 
 drawer and threw the clothes in 
 the fire. He kept a journal, to 
 improve what he was pleased 
 to call his "style." I used to 
 read selections from it to class- 
 mates who happened to drop 
 in while he was out, and it 
 
38 CHUMS. 
 
 never failed to entertain the 
 company. His views of col- 
 lege life had been formed from 
 a reading of that valuable 
 treatise, Todd's " Student's 
 Manual/' He was deeply im- 
 pressed by the necessity of ris- 
 ing at 6 A. M. to prepare the 
 morning lesson, and had bought 
 an alarm-clock to call him early. 
 There was always something 
 irregular about the perform 
 ances of this timepiece. On 
 going to bed he would set the 
 alarm for six. At first it used 
 to go off at midnight ; but he 
 rectified this with such success 
 that it declined to go off at all. 
 He generally awoke of his own 
 accord a little before six, and 
 waited for the alarm to strike. 
 Then, noticing that it was. past 
 the hour, he would get up and 
 
CHUMS. 39 
 
 set it off himself, and, having 
 thus discharged his duty to the 
 faithful monitor, return to bed 
 and sleep till the seven o'clock 
 prayer-bell rang. He was so 
 near-sighted that without his 
 glasses, which we used some- 
 times to secrete, he was as 
 helpless as the Phorcydes when 
 their one eye had been bor- 
 rowed by a neighbor. The 
 bridge of his nose being thin, 
 he was torn in his mind be- 
 tween deciduous glasses, with 
 limber springs, which he was 
 always shedding, and glasses 
 with stiff springs that pinched 
 his nose as in a vise and grad- 
 ually wore it away till it hung 
 by a thread. His classmates, 
 with that delicate consideration 
 for one another's infirmities 
 which we showed in the con- 
 
40 CHUMS. 
 
 sulship of Plancus, called him 
 " Lippus," or " Moon-Smeller." 
 But he was of a self-complacent 
 turn, and defended his position 
 by an article in the Lit., en- 
 titled " On the Disadvantages 
 arising from not being Near- 
 Sighted," which was greeted 
 with much derision. 
 
 We had obtained, by special 
 favor, an apartment in Old 
 Divinity, half of which build- 
 ing had already been torn 
 down to make room for the 
 foundation of Durfee. The 
 other half was allowed to 
 stand for a while for the 
 accommodation of its lodgers. 
 The north wall of the bed- 
 rooms in our section, however, 
 had been cut away, so that, 
 from Elm Street, Divinity 
 showed a raw 'end, with ampu- 
 
CHUMS. 41 
 
 tated timbers sticking out in 
 the air, ragged edges of brick 
 walls and lath-and-plaster parti- 
 tions, and tiers of interesting 
 interiors exposed, like cuts in 
 old editions of " Le Diable 
 Boiteux," representing the 
 stones of houses in Madrid 
 laid open to the eyes of Asmo- 
 deus and his pupil. The 
 modest tenants of the college, 
 of course, brought their bed- 
 room furniture into their 
 studies, and used their bisected 
 dormitories only as balconies, 
 sitting out there in the summer 
 evenings and holding little 
 receptions of friends, who 
 came to smoke a cigar a la belle 
 ttoile and survey the curious 
 state of the premises. I per- 
 suaded my chum to move his 
 bed inside, to sleep and even 
 
42 CHUMS. 
 
 to bathe in the study, but he 
 obstinately refused to bring in 
 the rest of his chamber-set. 
 Accordingly, passers-by on 
 Elm Street were daily refreshed 
 by the prospect of a row of 
 trousers, coats, night-shirts, 
 etc., hung upon the outer wall; 
 and every morning, about seven, 
 a mob of mechanics and shop- 
 girls collected to witness my 
 chum perform his toilet in 
 blank unconsciousness that he 
 was become a hissing and a 
 reproach. As he gauged 
 others' vision by his own, he 
 always maintained, when I re- 
 monstrated with him, that no 
 one could see him so far away 
 as Elm Street. At last a note 
 from the Faculty obliged him 
 to withdraw his effects into 
 " the estres of the grisly place," 
 
CHUMS. 43 
 
 and to leave nothing for the 
 public raze beyond a row of 
 hooks, a few chairs, and the 
 outside of the study door. 
 
 This chum was a cloth-shoe 
 kind of man. There was a 
 faint odor of " Brown's Bron- 
 chial Troches" always about 
 him. He kept an account of 
 his expenditures in a blank- 
 book, containing such entries 
 as "April 19, spent nine cents 
 for postage-stamps; ditto, six 
 cents horse-car fare to East 
 Rock ; ditto 20, gave two cents 
 to hand-organ man/' etc., etc. 
 He brushed his preposterous 
 clothes assiduously. In winter 
 he wore a red worsted tippet 
 and a cap with a fur button on 
 top. If the ground was wet, 
 he needfully turned up his 
 trousers about the ankle. If it 
 
44 CHUMS. 
 
 threatened snow, he carried an 
 umbrella tied about the waist 
 with a shoe-string. When I 
 watched the figure of my chum 
 thus equipped moving slowly 
 along in front of the colleges, 
 there was something so exas- 
 perating about it that I could 
 hardly keep from throwing 
 things at him. r 
 
 A very different person was 
 my roommate of Sophomore 
 year. His name was Rushton, 
 and he first endeared himself 
 to me by borrowing my tattered 
 copy of Arnold's " Greek Prose 
 Composition," carrying it off 
 to recitation, and bringing me 
 back in its stead a clean copy 
 belonging to a man in his divi- 
 sion, named Fitch. On the 
 fly-leaf, right under Fitch's 
 sign manual, Rushton had 
 
CHUMS. 45 
 
 written a graceful little dedica- 
 tion in verse, beginning : 
 
 " This book was once the book of Fitch, 
 From out the mazy depths of which 
 He fished most sweet and ancient Greek, 
 And made it, dead, alive to speak." 
 
 Such useful qualities in a 
 chum were not to be over- 
 looked, and I at once proposed 
 and was accepted. I may say 
 here that personal property in 
 text-books was a right unrec- 
 ognized consule Planco. There 
 was a beautiful community in 
 the aids and appliances of 
 learning, a genuine republic of 
 letters. It was rare to find a 
 man with a text-book in his 
 possession which had his own 
 name on it. I have bought of 
 the unblushing Hoadley the 
 keeper of the college bookstore 
 
46 CHUMS. 
 
 the same books several times 
 over ; books which I recognized 
 as formerly mine, blit which 
 had strayed back in some way 
 to their fountain-head. Apro- 
 pos of this, I find the follow- 
 ing entry in the records of the 
 Red Letter Club, in the hand- 
 writing of one of our neighbors: 
 " Last Saturday afternoon, B. 
 and R. had another lucrative 
 vendue of books which careless 
 parties have left in their room. 
 I was myself made to pay fifty 
 cents for a wretched old Ger- 
 man grammar which, I have 
 every reason to believe, be- 
 longed to Campbell." From 
 the proceeds of these auction- 
 sales was formed a sinking fund 
 devoted to the purchase of 
 rabbits and ale. In justice to 
 ourselves, it should be said that 
 
CHUMS. 47 
 
 we sometimes invited the 
 alleged former owners of the 
 books to share the feast with 
 us. This imperfect develop- 
 ment of the institution of 
 private ownership extended 
 even to articles of clothing. 
 There were about a dozen 
 dress suits in the class, and it 
 was found on trial that they 
 would fit everyone equally 
 well. But my chum often 
 complained, while making his 
 toilet of a morning, that I 
 bought my collars too small 
 for his neck. When " the 
 galled jade," as we called our 
 laundress, brought home our 
 week's washing, there was al- 
 ways a pleasing excitement in 
 watching her unload her bas- 
 ket. " Chum, look over the 
 clean filth," Rushton would 
 
48 CHUMS. 
 
 call out from the lounge, " and 
 see if there's anything new. 
 I hope she put in some of 
 Harding's handkerchiefs : I 
 like them better than Blake's, 
 and Hubbard's are about 
 played out." 
 
 We began housekeeping 
 with five chairs. These were 
 soon reduced to two, and then 
 to one. My chum did not sit 
 in so many chairs at once as 
 Edward Everett's roommate 
 is said to have done. Still, to 
 persons of a sedentary habit, 
 seats of some kind are almost 
 a necessity ; and it became a 
 question how we were to re- 
 place ours. Presentation Day 
 was our great annual oppor- 
 tunity ; for then numbers of 
 chairs were taken out into the 
 entries and the yard, for the 
 
CHUMS. 49 
 
 ladies to sit in during the read- 
 ing of class-histories ; and, after 
 the assembly rose and followed 
 the procession to the library to 
 witness the planting of the ivy, 
 the frugal householder who 
 was on the lookout for chairs 
 could get a very good assort- 
 ment to start the new year 
 with. But Presentation was 
 still far distant when our last 
 chair gave out. In this strait 
 we hinted to our sweep that 
 there were large deposits of 
 chairs stored about college 
 in the cellar of South, e. g\ 
 which at present were merely 
 matter out of place, and that 
 he would deserve well of his 
 country who should put some 
 of them where they would do 
 the most good. The hint was 
 enough. One night we were 
 
50 CHUMS. 
 
 awakened by a low, chuckling 
 sound, and by the dim fire- 
 light in our outer room we dis- 
 cerned a Senegambian proces- 
 sion, each member of which 
 carried a pair of chairs, which 
 he stood softly upon their feet 
 and then withdrew. It was 
 all like a dream ; but next 
 morning there the chairs were, 
 in wood and cane. It was 
 perhaps in part the knowledge 
 of this guilty secret which kept 
 us ever after in thraldom to 
 our aged sweep. He used to 
 chuckle gently, as he dusted 
 the ill-gotten things, and say, 
 with a shake of the head, 
 " This chair gettin' pretty 
 rickety. Good deal like d'ole 
 man: won't las' much longer." 
 But, indeed, my chum and 
 myself, being both afflicted 
 
CHUMS. 51 
 
 with moral cowardice, were 
 shamefully bullied by all our 
 employees. The "galled jade " 
 so wrought upon our feelings by 
 her widowed state and by the 
 two small orphans who some- 
 times came with her of a Mon- 
 day and lurked bashfully in 
 the crack of the door, that we 
 paid our wash bills without a 
 murmur, and without the heart 
 to mention the disappearance 
 of that long caravan of shirts 
 and cuffs which she had burned, 
 lacerated, and abstracted at 
 various times. Our sweep, of 
 whom we stood in the most 
 terror, was a smooth old swin- 
 dler, with a molasses-candy 
 complexion and great elastic- 
 ity of conscience. Every now 
 and then he would vanish for 
 a week, leaving us to make 
 
52 CHUMS. 
 
 the fire and fetch the water. 
 Under the pressure of these 
 chores, desperation brought a 
 kind of boldness. 
 
 " Rushton," I would say, 
 " you have got to bully White 
 for this when he comes back." 
 
 " No, chum ; you bully him. 
 I'm afraid." 
 
 " So am I afraid." 
 
 " Well, let's flip up a cent for 
 it." 
 
 " No, sir : it's your turn. I 
 did it last time." 
 
 " The deuce you did ! I 
 heard what you said to him. 
 Do you call that bullying ? " 
 
 "Well, then, we'll both do 
 it." 
 
 So, when our coffee-colored 
 tyrant appeared at the end of 
 the week, with an obsequious 
 face, but limping and groaning 
 
CHUMS. 53 
 
 aloud, as if in pain, I would 
 commence, in a trembling 
 voice, " Well, White, we haven't 
 seen you for quite a while." 
 
 '* No, sah," he would answer, 
 with a reproachful look ; " d'ole 
 man 'mos' lef you for good dis 
 time. Started to get out of 
 bed las' Monday mornin', and 
 d'lumbago took me awful bad. 
 Haint set foot to de floor sence. 
 Ole man had a mighty narrow 
 shave of it dis time. Wife skis 
 been sick, too : got her ole 
 complaint twistin' of de long 
 bowel, she calls it. 'Mos' as 
 bad as d'lumbago 'self." 
 
 In face of such accumulated 
 miseries our stern intent dis- 
 solved, and, as neither of us 
 ever got courage to dismiss him, 
 things went on as before. We 
 afterward found out that our 
 
54 CHUMS. 
 
 sweep was an energetic exhorter 
 at " nigger union/' It used to 
 be customary for squads of 
 students to visit that house of 
 worship on Sunday evenings 
 not, it must be confessed, in an 
 entirely devotional spirit. On 
 one such occasion, our sweep 
 having been absent from his 
 duties several days, presumably 
 tossing upon a bed of pain, we 
 were surprised to see him in the 
 pulpit, sustained on either side 
 by a sturdy deacon, while he 
 called sinners to repentance 
 with an expenditure of horse- 
 power that would have sufficed, 
 if applied along the line of his 
 work, to black our boots for a 
 week and to carry a hogshead 
 of water from the south pump 
 to our bedroom. Whether he 
 recognized us in the congrega- 
 
CHUMS. 55 
 
 tion we never knew. He cer- 
 tainly did not change color. 
 
 One of the fellest destroyers 
 of chairs was a classmate and 
 frequent visitor, whom we called 
 Thersites. He was a small, 
 light man, and it seemed in- 
 credible that he should break 
 so many chairs in a term. But 
 it was his emphasis that did it, 
 rather than his weight. He 
 used the chairs as instruments 
 for expressing that loathing and 
 contempt for most of the class 
 of '69 which he could only im- 
 perfectly utter in words. " Ye 
 gods ! " he would shout, at the 
 mention of some classmate who, 
 having recently taken a prize 
 in Linonia prize-debate, was 
 spoken of as a sure man for 
 a Lit. editorship next year; 
 " Dusenbury a Lit. editor J 
 
56 CHUMS. 
 
 One of Nature's feeble men ! 
 A microcephalous idiot! An 
 ass and the foal of an ass ! 
 Rotten pumpkin is granite to 
 Dusenbury ! " And crack would' 
 go a chair. 
 
 " Look out, Billy ! " we would 
 remonstrate. "Calm yourself; 
 calm yourself. There are worse 
 men in the world than poor 
 Dusenbury." 
 
 " Hang your old chair ! Oh, 
 you don't suffer from these 
 asses as I do. I tell you, the 
 thought of them is actual phys- 
 ical pain to me." 
 
 And, abandoning the wreck 
 of the chair, he would grovel 
 on the floor and groan aloud. 
 Where art thou, oh, Thersites, 
 kindest-hearted of misan- 
 thropes ? Whither in this asi- 
 nine world hast thou wandered ? 
 
CHUMS. 57 
 
 I would thou wert even now 
 before me : 
 
 " That I might hear thee call great 
 
 Caesar ass 
 Unpolicied." 
 
 For Thersites was no respecter 
 of persons. 
 
 Our stove was a grate whose 
 modest dimensions gave no 
 token of an appetite so abnor- 
 mal that Rushton declared it 
 had a tape-worm. When well 
 fed it gave out too much 
 heat became, in fact, as my 
 chum complained, " a young 
 hell on legs"; and when we 
 sat around it discussing the- 
 ology on Sunday evenings, the 
 Lares and Penates seemed to 
 dance visibly upon the minia- 
 ture iron hearth, like imps 
 before the threshold of their 
 
58 CHUMS. 
 
 home of pain. When times 
 were flush, we glutted its maw 
 with the best of Lehigh ; but 
 during the third quarter of a 
 term there comes a slack time 
 in college finances, when it is 
 impossible to borrow and hard 
 to get tick. Then we were 
 driven to fill the vacuum in our 
 coal-bin by witty expedients. 
 First we consumed spare 
 articles of furniture, portions 
 of the college fence, etc. At 
 last we had recourse to the 
 partitions of our coal-closet. 
 As our neighbors practiced 
 similar economies, postern 
 gates and intricate passages 
 from room to room were 
 opened through the walls, 
 which were often convenient 
 when a sudden attack by the 
 Faculty on one entry made it 
 
CHUMS. 59 
 
 prudent to escape into another. 
 The chief objection to the 
 planking of our coal-closets, 
 considered as fuel, was the 
 length of the timbers. We 
 had no means of reducing 
 these to the right size except 
 by putting the ends of the 
 beams in the stove and resting 
 the other ends on a semicircle 
 of chairs in the middle of the 
 room. As the boards burned 
 down, we shoved them farther 
 in, and the half-circle of chairs, 
 with a constantly diminishing 
 radius, approached nearer and 
 nearer to the stove, until the 
 planks reached a shortness that 
 enabled them to go into the 
 grate ; and then we occupied the 
 chairs ourselves and pantingly 
 inhaled the smoke with which 
 this process had filled the room. 
 
60 CHUMS. 
 
 As to our bedstead, very ex- 
 aggerated rumors were current 
 in the class, traceable to the 
 secretary of the Red Letter 
 Club, who, having once had 
 a glimpse of our penetralia, 
 brought back into the outer 
 world the following injurious 
 report : 
 
 " The room itself is a sort of 
 chaos of seedy valises, broken 
 chairs, candle-boxes, decayed 
 boots, and valueless raiment ; 
 while a very chaotic thing in- 
 deed is the iron bedstead, with 
 three legs, aerated bedding, and 
 flaming quilts." 
 
 Now, some support may have 
 been given to this slander by 
 our having bestowed upon our 
 bedstead the pet name of 
 Tripos. But this was not 
 meant to be accurately descrip- 
 
CHUMS. 6 1 
 
 tive : the fourth leg was there, 
 though not usually in working 
 order. Those who are familiar 
 with the anatomy of an iron 
 bedstead know that the legs are 
 kept upright by a peg inserted 
 in a hole at the junction of the 
 leg with the horizontal frame 
 of the structure. This peg was 
 missing in the case of our 
 southeast leg. We had re- 
 placed it by a nail, which 
 slipped out and disappeared ; 
 then by a lead-pencil, which 
 broke. Finally, we gave it up, 
 and allowed that corner of the 
 couch to repose gently upon 
 the floor. This gave an angle 
 to our slumbers of about fif- 
 teen degrees the same which 
 is given by the " Adirondack 
 Patent Camp Lounge." We 
 grew in time to prefer this 
 
62 CHUMS. 
 
 slight slope to the strictly hori- 
 zontal plane of ordinary beds, 
 and made no further efforts to 
 restore the fourth leg to a ver- 
 tical position. Originally my 
 chum had possessed a wooden 
 four-poster of his own, but this 
 had disappeared about the 
 middle of Sophomore year. 
 Whether, like Margery Daw, 
 he had sold it in a moment of 
 recklessness, or whether we had 
 used it for fuel, I have for- 
 gotten. I only know that in 
 very cold weather, when our 
 coal-bin was low, the life of any 
 wooden thing at No. North 
 College was apt to be a short 
 one. 
 
 Through Junior year I con- 
 tinued nominally to room with 
 Rushton. But in the second 
 term a difference of opinion 
 
CHUMS. 63 
 
 between the Faculty and myself 
 on the subject of my attend- 
 ance at morning prayers forced 
 me to pitch my tent outside 
 the College Yard. Under a 
 strict construction of the law I 
 should have gone away from 
 New Haven altogether; but 
 this would have been incon- 
 venient. I therefore satisfied 
 the spirit of my sentence by 
 retiring to a country-seat on 
 the Canal Railroad, which was 
 remote enough to amount to a 
 practical banishment, though 
 technically within the limits of 
 the town. I owed this sub- 
 urban asylum to the hospi- 
 tality of a friend in the Shef- 
 field Scientific School, who had 
 lived a life of retirement there 
 for over a year. I stayed with 
 him for a month or more, and 
 
64 CHUMS. 
 
 the episode was unique in my 
 college life. The home of my 
 rustication was an old-fashioned 
 house, with high pitched roof 
 and dormer windows, standing 
 in a grove of pines, among whose 
 murmurous needles the March 
 wind made all day and night a 
 sound as of the sea. There was 
 a decayed garden, with box 
 borders and althaea trees. The 
 front gate was spanned by a 
 wooden arch, which gave a tri- 
 umphal effect to the simple act 
 of entering the yard. Behind 
 the house was a hill covered 
 with woods, and in front, at 
 the distance of a few rods, ran 
 the railway. We were as 
 secluded from the currents of 
 college life, or indeed from the 
 life of the city whose factory 
 whistles blew close by, as if we 
 
CHUMS. 65 
 
 had sojourned on the highest 
 hill-top of Litchfield County. 
 Never by any chance did a tutor 
 or a student stray our way. 
 Mechanics with their tin pails 
 went up and down the rail- 
 way-track at morning and 
 evening. The few neighbors 
 who dwelt beyond us in the 
 same valley passed the house 
 occasionally. But the farmers 
 driving in or out of town took 
 the highroad on the ridge be- 
 hind us, or the long boulevard 
 a quarter of a mile beyond 
 the railway. Hardly a dozen 
 vehicles a day disturbed the 
 dust in front of our garden 
 fence. 
 
 My host and chum for the 
 nonce was a man of intense 
 application. He was taking a 
 course in the chemical labora- 
 
66 CHUMS. 
 
 tory, and he disappeared every 
 morning after breakfast and re- 
 turned to dinner in the even- 
 ing, lunching in town to save 
 time. Thus I was alone all 
 day. The season was early 
 spring, the weather raw and 
 blustering ; so I stayed indoors 
 and read steadily. My chum's 
 room was a pleasant one, with 
 a high ceiling and an open fire- 
 place. The walls were hung 
 with trophies of a year's survey 
 in Arizona a water canteen, a 
 Mexican stirrup, a lasso which 
 reflected the firelight from its 
 coils of hard, shining leather, 
 and cheerful photographs of 
 debris slopes, caftons, alkaline 
 deserts, and sage bushes. After 
 reading myself into shreds and 
 beginning to yield to the 
 drowsiness produced by the 
 
CHUMS. 67 
 
 singing of the logs in the fire 
 and the monotonous rattle of 
 the window sash in the wind, I 
 would get into my overcoat 
 about five o'clock and set out 
 for a constitutional and an ap- 
 petite against the dinner hour. 
 It would not do to be seen in 
 New Haven, and so, for fear of 
 peripatetic tutors, I confined 
 my walks mostly to the rail- 
 road track, which ran out 
 through Newhallville into the 
 flat agricultural region beyond. 
 The Canal Railroad " the 
 raging canawl," as my chum 
 called it was not without a 
 quiet picturesqueness of its 
 own. 'Twas a leisurely and 
 primitive road. The trains 
 which occasionally appeared 
 upon it, proceeding northward 
 in a deliberate manner, seemed 
 
68 CHUMS. 
 
 not to obey any time schedule, 
 but to start whenever there 
 were people enough at the 
 station to make up a earful- 
 country neighbors, in the main, 
 I should judge, returning from 
 a day's shopping in town. 
 And the conductor, having 
 noted their familiar faces on 
 the down trip in the morning, 
 would obligingly wait till he 
 was sure they were all on board 
 for the home voyage before he 
 gave the signal to get under 
 way. I often followed, in 
 fancy, the progress of one of 
 these Bummelziige as it disap- 
 peared in the horizon. I 
 thought of all the little be- 
 whittled wooden station houses 
 by which it would pause, each 
 with Something-?/*//^ painted 
 on a board over the door ; of 
 
CHUMS. 69 
 
 the lonely country roads where 
 the inevitable farmer, jogging 
 homeward in his wagon, would 
 sit waiting at the crossing for 
 the cars to pass ; of the back- 
 door yards chickens roosting 
 on the telegraph wire where 
 it would slow up to deliver a 
 letter or bundle to a woman in 
 a check apron coming down to 
 to the fence from the kitchen 
 door ; and how then it would 
 leave the region of villages al- 
 together and come to where 
 the grass begins to grow be- 
 tween the sleepers, and the 
 train, going slower and slower 
 in the gathering dusk, would 
 finally come to a standstill in 
 a wide plain, with no house 
 in sight. Once I even boarded 
 a train and rode for two or 
 three stations. There was only 
 
70 CHUMS. 
 
 one passenger car, and It had, 
 as I had expected, a do- 
 mestic air more like a private 
 parlor, or say the conference 
 room of a country meeting 
 house, than like a rail car. 
 The passengers all appeared to 
 know one another. Two or 
 three of them who stood on the 
 platform addressed the solitary 
 brakeman as " Charlie." The 
 conductor, after going through 
 the form of taking up my ticket, 
 sat down and conversed with 
 different acquaintances. He 
 had the reposeful manner of 
 one who knew that there was 
 no chance of a collision on 
 that road, that the track was 
 clear from terminus to terminus. 
 A good tramp up the track 
 and down again, with a glass of 
 new ale and a butter-cracker at 
 
CHUMS. 7 1 
 
 the grocery in Newhallville (a 
 resort of merit, where was much 
 real life going on), shook off 
 the afternoon's drowsiness, and 
 put me in trim for dinner, when 
 my chum arrived with books 
 from the library, news from 
 Academus, the daily papers, 
 and sometimes letters from con- 
 fiding parents, who figured me 
 still dwelling at No. North 
 Middle College, on the " second 
 stage of discipline,'' and knew 
 not, alas ! that I had already 
 entered the purgatory of that 
 third and final stage. My 
 chum's budget came like " hints 
 and tokens of the world to 
 spirits folded in the womb." 
 For in truth the loneliness of 
 my existence began to wear 
 upon me. It was that time of 
 year when the lengthening days 
 
72 CHUMS. 
 
 bring no vernal thoughts, but 
 the pale, cold light lingers 
 cheerlessly over the naked 
 landscape. The spring is full 
 of hope, but from the middle of 
 March to the middle of April 
 it is hope deferred, and the 
 melancholy twilights are full of 
 disquiet and regret. A fati- 
 guing wind blows continually ; 
 cold, but with no tonic in its 
 coldness such as the winds 
 of autumn have. From the 
 ditches along the railway em- 
 bankment, the bed of the old 
 Hamden and Hampshire Canal, 
 and from the ponds and swamps 
 of the level land, rose the croak 
 of frogs, subdued to a monoto- 
 nous ring as of distant sleigh- 
 bells, and giving fit expression 
 to the feeling of the season and 
 the hour. 
 
CHUMS. 73 
 
 This interregnum chum of 
 mine was a man of Spartan 
 habits. To keep himself in 
 trim for work, every morning 
 before breakfast he ate a soda 
 cracker (by way of foundation), 
 ran a mile, and returning, took 
 a cold bath in his hat-tub. We 
 slept in a wintry room under 
 the roof, and often he would 
 wake me by his yells as the icy 
 water poured down his back. 
 The instrument of his torture 
 was a sponge, which he had 
 brought with him from his boy- 
 hood's home. It was originally, 
 I think, a carriage sponge. At 
 all events, like Captain Costi- 
 gan's hair-brush, it was " an 
 ancient and wondrous piece," 
 having the softness and absorb- 
 ent power of pumice stone. 
 The water poured through its 
 
74 CHUMS. 
 
 perforations without soaking 
 into its cellular tissue in the 
 least, while its surface rasped 
 the skin like a strigil. Long 
 practice and an intimate knowl- 
 edge of the dip of the labyrinths 
 and galleries that honeycombed 
 this monumental rock-work en- 
 abled its owner to carry up about 
 half a pint of water in it. But 
 a red artillerist in the class, who 
 once partook of our hospitali- 
 ties over-night, and was invited 
 to use the sponge in the morn- 
 ing, spoke of it bitterly as a 
 " d d breech-loading nutmeg 
 grater." My chum tried to 
 persuade me to eat a cracker 
 and run, but I preferred my 
 exercise in a more conservative 
 shape. As to the bath, I agreed 
 with him in principle, but my 
 practice was more flexible than 
 
CHUMS. 75 
 
 his own, varying somewhat with 
 the temperature. He said that 
 a man who didn't have at least 
 one tub a day was a cad. But 
 I asked him whether he sup- 
 posed that Sir Philip Sidney 
 committed total immersion 
 daily. In Germany, I after- 
 ward noticed, a bath is not 
 undertaken in this leichtsinnig 
 way of ours, but only with 
 medical advice and after long 
 and prayerful consideration. 
 
 Perhaps the most remark- 
 able of all my chums was he 
 of Senior year. Barlow had a 
 vivid though prosaic imagina- 
 tion, which delighted in gro- 
 tesque and sometimes loath- 
 some images. I once heard 
 him gravely declare that, hav- 
 ing been in Switzerland while 
 a boy, he had seen a cretin 
 
76 CHUMS. 
 
 wheeling his goitre before him 
 on a wheelbarrow. It was 
 Barlow who fixed upon one of 
 the tutors the name of Glass- 
 legs. He asserted that the 
 tutor in question was possessed 
 of a delusion that his legs were 
 made of glass, and that, at sea- 
 sons when his monomania 
 became acute, he clamored 
 aloud to be laid in sawdust. 
 He said that he once met him 
 on Chapel Street carrying a 
 large covered basket on his 
 arm, and that, stopping to 
 speak with him for a moment, 
 he accidentally jostled the 
 basket, whereupon his inter- 
 locutor, glancing nervously at 
 his precious burden, said in an 
 impressive whisper, " Be care- 
 ful, please ; this basket contains 
 my legs, and they are very 
 
CHUMS. 77 
 
 brittle. A slight jar might 
 produce fracture.*' 
 
 Barlow also asserted that he 
 was present once at morning 
 chapel when Tutor Cosine, 
 whose duty it was to conduct 
 the exercises, began his prayer 
 as follows : " O Thou who dost 
 cause the planets to revolve 
 in their elliptical orbits the 
 force of attraction varying in- 
 versely as the square of the 
 distance." His imagination 
 was so much in excess of 
 his learning that it often led 
 him into difficulties at exami- 
 nations and otherwise. Thus, 
 at Sophomore annual, when 
 the Faculty made their usual 
 unsuccessful effort to drop him, 
 he had got a passage from the 
 "Agamemnon," descriptive of 
 that hero's assassination by 
 
78 CHUMS. 
 
 Clytemnestra, in which occurred 
 the line, 
 
 QoLviaf 6p6aov. 
 
 (" He strikes me with a 
 black drop of bloody dew.") 
 
 Barlow knew that fiotXksiv 
 meant " to strike/' but the rest 
 of the line was Greek to him. 
 At last a reminiscence of the 
 Cyclops and the Odyssey of 
 Freshman year came athwart 
 his mind, and he wrote trium- 
 phantly, " He strikes me with 
 a smooth stick of green peeled 
 olive-wood." 
 
 He was also somewhat defec- 
 tive in logic. He had ex- 
 hausted his ingenuity in fram- 
 ing excuses for absence from 
 prayers. Thrice had the nose- 
 bleed overtaken him just as he 
 was entering the sacred portals. 
 
CHUMS. 79 
 
 Twice he had fallen prostrate in 
 a puddle when the bell was on 
 its last strokes. Once a bee 
 had stung him on the eyelid 
 at the same critical moment. 
 Accordingly, having made a 
 resolution to sleep over no 
 more, he wrote on a slip of 
 paper, " Dunham, wake me at 
 6.45," and put it in a conspicu- 
 ous place where the sweep 
 would see it in the morning. 
 The faithful Dunham obeyed 
 instructions to the letter, and I 
 was awakened myself at the 
 hour mentioned by bad lan- 
 guage from my chum's bed- 
 room. 
 
 " What's loose ? " I inquired. 
 
 "That blasted nigger woke 
 me up, and it's only a quarter 
 of seven." 
 
 " Well, you left a notice 
 
o CHUMS. 
 
 for him to wake you, didn't 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes; but I thought he 
 couldn't read." 
 
 Barlow was a lazy man so 
 much so that, having occasion 
 for frequent profanity when 
 studying his mathematical les- 
 sons, he had written on the 
 wall near the head of the 
 lounge, where he usually lay, a 
 double column of imprecations. 
 A single glance at this, he said, 
 was equivalent to half a dozen 
 swears, on the principle of the 
 Chinese praying machine, and 
 saved him the labor of iteration. 
 If he had put half the time 
 into study that he put into 
 contriving "skinning" appara- 
 tus for examinations, he might 
 have taken the Valedictory. 
 This apparatus was often of 
 
CHUMS. 8 1 
 
 great intricacy, and depended 
 on a delicate adjustment of 
 chances. One of his plans, 
 e. g., made it necessary for the 
 operator to secure a seat near 
 the window of the examina- 
 tion-room. From this, which 
 must be providentially open, 
 he was to lower his question- 
 paper to the ground by a string. 
 There it was to be received 
 by two classmates strong in 
 mathematics, who f were to 
 work out the problems and 
 write the solutions on another 
 piece of paper. A fourth con- 
 spirator was then to knock at 
 the door of the examination- 
 room and distract the examin- 
 er's attention by handing him 
 a long telegram, dispatched for 
 the nonce by a fifth accomplice 
 dwelling in suspension at Stam- 
 
82 CHUMS. 
 
 ford. Under cover of this di- 
 version, and at a signal from 
 below, the operator was to hoist 
 away on his string and bring 
 in the paper of solutions. My 
 chum spent hours in polishing 
 this scheme and perfecting all 
 its details. It attained a certain 
 ideal symmetry and even a 
 poetic beauty under his hands. 
 It set in motion such numbers 
 of men, and required such sim- 
 ultaneous convergence upon 
 strategic points, that it affected 
 the imagination like the evolu- 
 tions of armies. It was a pity 
 that the examiner innocently 
 defeated the scheme by assign- 
 ing seats in alphabetical order, 
 which brought my chum far 
 from the window of his hope. 
 The two confederates mighty 
 in mathematics waited long 
 
CHUMS. 83 
 
 under the Lyceum wall, and 
 wondered why tarried the 
 wheels of his chariot. In vain 
 the exile of Stamford sent a 
 long and very expensive tele- 
 gram, praying for a shortening 
 of his suspension. The mes- 
 sage remained in the pocket of 
 Fourth Murderer, who found 
 his occupation gone. By such 
 simple means do the gods con- 
 found the vain imaginations of 
 men. 
 
 Barlow was also of a cheer- 
 ful and sanguine poverty. He 
 would waste his substance by 
 heating pennies on the stove 
 and tossing them out of the 
 window among a crowd of 
 " muckers/* rejoicing when 
 they greedily picked up the 
 hot coins and then dropped 
 them with cries of grief and 
 
84 CHUMS. 
 
 rage. Once he broke up an 
 orphan procession returning 
 from Sunday-school by fling- 
 ing a shower of coppers into 
 the muddiest part of Chapel 
 Street, by South College. And 
 one day, on the fence, he 
 bought out, for the sum of 
 twenty-five cents to him in 
 hand paid, the entire stock in 
 trade of a lemonade-peddler, 
 on condition entered into by 
 Johnny Roach, the newsboy of 
 Morocco Street, that he would 
 drink the whole. There was 
 about a gallon, and such a 
 prospect of unlimited sensual 
 enjoyment had probably never 
 entered into Johnny's wildest 
 dream. He drank the first 
 half of his contract with un- 
 flagging gusto. His sense of 
 duty carried him manfully 
 
CHUMS. 85 
 
 through the third quart ; but 
 the only thing that sustained 
 him in the last quadrant of the 
 job was the thought that if 
 he left a single drop undrunk 
 he would hereafter regret 
 his wasted opportunity. Pres- 
 ently he writhed upon the 
 sward in awful agonies, and 
 extorted from my terrified 
 chum another twenty-five cents 
 wherewith to buy brandy for. 
 an antidote. 
 
 It was during Senior year 
 that my stand ran down from a 
 Philosophical to a First Dis- 
 pute. " Company villainous 
 company hath been the spoil 
 of me." My previous room- 
 mates had few followers, and 
 I could study in peace. But 
 Barlow was of a gregarious 
 turn, and his friends swarmed 
 
86 CHUMS. 
 
 upon us like myrmidons. They 
 respected neither the age and 
 infirmity of our furniture, nor 
 the sacred ties of blood. One 
 afternoon I heard sounds of 
 ribaldry as I approached my 
 room, and inside I found a 
 crowd busy in target-practice. 
 With my new pair of compasses 
 they were spearing, at ten 
 paces, a card nailed to the coal- 
 closet door, which turned out 
 on examination to be the pho- 
 tograph of the Rev. Erastus 
 Buel, a remote collateral rela- 
 tive, which they had taken from 
 my album. 
 
 My chum was fain to be a 
 sporting-man. He bought a 
 small Scotch terrier, which he 
 used to drag about the yard on 
 the end of a string, where it 
 looked like a fur muff. The 
 
CHUMS. 87 
 
 keeping of dogs was contrary 
 to regulations ; but the tutor 
 in our entry, who roomed 
 directly under us, good-na- 
 turedly winked at the offense. 
 But one day, disturbed by a 
 boxing-match overhead be- 
 tween Barlow and a visitor, he 
 called to remonstrate, and mis- 
 taking Shagbark for the door- 
 mat, undertook to wipe his feet 
 on him, and was chewed as to 
 the calf-part. Shag, thus rudely 
 brought to the notice of au- 
 thority, could no longer be 
 ignored, and Barlow had to sell 
 him to a local fancier. 
 
 In the matter of visitors, it is 
 apt to be in college very much 
 as in a large city : one has not 
 necessarily much acquaintance 
 with the men in one's own 
 entry, unless, indeed, the entry 
 
CHUMS, 
 
 has been " packed." The only 
 one of our immediate neighbors 
 in Senior year with whom 
 we constantly forgathered was 
 Nimrod in the adjoining entry, 
 with whose premises we estab- 
 lished a back-door communica- 
 tion by breaking down the par- 
 tition of the coal-closet. Before 
 this was done, rumors of Nim- 
 rod had been wafted through 
 the wall, exciting guesses as to 
 his probable character. One 
 day, going into my coal-closet, 
 I heard a groan as of someone 
 in pain, on the other side of 
 the partition, and, listening 
 intently, distinguished these 
 words repeated over and over 
 again : " I'm a plain, blunt 
 man ; I'm a plain, blunt man." 
 
 Fearing for our neighbor's 
 sanity, I made inquiries about 
 
CHUMS. 89 
 
 him, and learned that he prac- 
 ticed declamation in his room, 
 and that, emulating Demos- 
 thenes, he wore pebbles in his 
 mouth at recitation. When we 
 finally penetrated the wall that 
 sundered us and entered into 
 personal intimacy with Nimrod, 
 we found him a person of traits. 
 He was a patriotic class and 
 society man, and used his ora- 
 torical talent with effect in class 
 meetings. He was reported to 
 have spoken eloquently when 
 initiated into Psi Upsilon, and 
 to have exclaimed, tapping him- 
 self upon the breast, " Mr. Presi- 
 dent, I know not how others 
 may feel on this occasion, but 
 there's a little lump of flesh 
 right here that is one mass of 
 love for Psi Upsilon." He had 
 devised and caused to be 
 
90 CHUMS. 
 
 engraved a class coat-of-arms 
 bearing the legend, " One link 
 shall bind us ever : we were 
 classmates at old Yale.'* He 
 vainly tried to get my cynical 
 chum to subscribe for a copy 
 of this, reproaching him with 
 a lack of class spirit. " Fifty 
 cents for a class-poster?" Bar- 
 low would answer. " Four 
 excellent cigars for a class- 
 stamp ? Ten glasses of beer 
 for a dashed old pasteboard 
 with a lying motto on it ? Go 
 to the bond-holder, thou slug- 
 gard : I can't afford such frivol- 
 ities." 
 
 Nimrod was likewise a mighty 
 hunter of memorabilia, and, in 
 company with our eminent 
 philatelist, who had a similar 
 weakness, scoured the univer- 
 sity in search of relics. He had 
 
CHUMS. QI 
 
 an unrivaled collection in his 
 room, and once imperiled his 
 life to add to it the hour-hand 
 of the clock on Lyceum Tower. 
 Owing to the supineness of the 
 Time Service Department, this 
 indicator had been walking over 
 the course in solitary state for 
 nearly a month, its livelier sister 
 having been borne off by a bold 
 Freshman. Before Nimrod 
 captured the surviving pointer 
 it was possible to form an ap- 
 proximate notion of the time 
 of day. After that there re- 
 mained nothing but a nubbin, 
 which continued its inane revo- 
 lutions at the center of the dial 
 for a month or two more. But 
 Nimrod's favorite bit of mem- 
 orabil, and one of which he 
 always spoke with a quiet rap- 
 ture, was a Junior Exhibition 
 
Q2 CHUMS. 
 
 Programme of the Class of 1810. 
 It had an engraving of a cor- 
 pulent winged female haling a 
 similar allegorical figure toward 
 a pavilion perched on a roll of 
 solid cloud. Underneath was 
 the inscription, " Genius con- 
 ducted by Learning to the 
 Temple of Fame." 
 
 The mention of this work of 
 art reminds me to speak of our 
 wall decorations. These were 
 entirely the contributions of 
 my several chums, and were all 
 characteristic. In Senior year 
 they consisted of Barlow's foils 
 and boxing-gloves, photos of 
 favorite actresses and of the 
 crew and the nine, colored litho- 
 graphs of celebrated American 
 trotters, etc. In Freshman 
 year they were mostly worsted 
 wall-baskets and slipper-cases, 
 
CHUMS. 93 
 
 embroidered pen-wipers, watch- 
 pockets in bead-work, and other 
 creations of the needle furnished 
 by female adherents of my 
 chum who dwelt in the remote 
 wild West. In Sophomore 
 year only had we been really 
 aesthetic, Rushton having pro- 
 duced from his trunk and hung 
 upon the wall a number of 
 pictures, mostly without frames, 
 a circumstance which, he 
 said, was high-toned and gave 
 them an air of the artist's 
 studio. One of these was a 
 photographic copy of Raphael's 
 " Transfiguration." Another 
 was a small black oil, invisible 
 save in a strong light, when it 
 yielded a dim human form 
 doing something with a wine- 
 glass. This, Rushton said, was 
 " The Wine-Taster," a genuine 
 
94 CHUMS. 
 
 Smith. And when I complained 
 that it was impossible to see 
 it, he explained that that was 
 design. " Don't you notice the 
 dank cellar-light ? " he asked ; 
 " how wonderfully the subter- 
 ranean effect is rendered ? " 
 
 When we came to break up 
 housekeeping at the end of 
 Senior year, we found the proc- 
 ess a simple one. Such of our 
 effects as were salable we sold 
 to the Irishwomen who go 
 about the colleges picking up 
 bargains a week or two before 
 Commencement when the 
 elms are so bestuck with par- 
 ti-colored furniture advertise- 
 ments that they seem to have 
 on ragged and patched stock- 
 ings to the knee. What was 
 unsalable we abandoned to the 
 sweeps. I remember my last 
 
CHUMS. 95 
 
 night in the dismantled room, 
 where the slanting bedstead and 
 debilitated chairs stood about 
 confusedly on the bare floor. 
 It was the evening of Presenta- 
 tion Day. The class histories 
 had been read, the ivy planted, 
 the parting ode sung. The 
 class had marched around with 
 the band, cheering each of the 
 old buildings in turn, and had 
 then broken ranks forever. I 
 had taken supper with my 
 chum, and bidden him good-by 
 at the station, being about to 
 leave myself on the following 
 morning. The entry was quite 
 deserted when I climbed the 
 staircase to our room. I had 
 no lamp, so I lit a cigar, and, 
 sitting down in the dark, by 
 the open window, listened to 
 the din of the summer insects 
 
96 CHUMS. 
 
 and the rustle of the breeze in 
 the elms. The crowd of the 
 afternoon had dispersed, and 
 the yard was quite still. Most 
 of the underclassmen had gone 
 away some days before, and 
 only a few lights glimmered 
 along the college row. At the 
 formal leave-taking in Alumni 
 Hall, where many of the fel- 
 lows had been " all broke up," 
 I had felt no emotion ; and my 
 chum and myself had agreed, 
 in talking it over at supper, that 
 the ceremony was not in good 
 taste. One is always apt to 
 resent a set occasion for grief 
 and to refuse to honor any such 
 draft on the feelings, just as 
 one takes a perverse pleasure 
 in declining to be impressed to 
 order by a famous landscape or 
 picture or cathedral. The soul 
 
CHUMS. 97 
 
 must take its own time. But 
 now, as I sat alone in the de- 
 serted room and realized that a 
 pleasant chapter of life was 
 closed, that youth was over and 
 friends were gone, and that I 
 must put forth on the morrow 
 from the green shelter of Alma 
 Mater, I discovered that I had 
 struck deeper roots in the life 
 of the last four years than I 
 had even suspected. 
 
 It suited our mood to talk 
 lightly of many things in those 
 ancient times. In our view of 
 one another we affected a cer- 
 tain humorous exaggeration, 
 which I have here tried to re- 
 produce. Young men of our 
 race have a wholesome shame 
 of making a fuss about their 
 deeper feelings. " We never," 
 says Thoreau, " exchange more 
 
98 CHUMS. 
 
 than three words with a friend 
 in our lives on that level to 
 which our thoughts and feelings 
 almost habitually rise. One 
 goes forth prepared to say, 
 ' Sweet friends/ and the saluta- 
 tion is, ' Damn your eyes ! ' ' 
 It should not, therefore, be 
 thought that the prevailing 
 attitude among us was one of 
 levity. In college life and 
 friendships, under a mask of 
 reserve there is much of true 
 sentiment, and even of romance. 
 The freshness of hope and the 
 stir of newly awakened thought 
 shed a glamour over what would 
 otherwise be a dull routine. 
 
 " 'Tis the May light 
 That crimsons all the quiet college gloom." 
 
 In later life our friendships 
 become worldlier. We distrust 
 
CHUMS. 99 
 
 our impulses, and accept the 
 conventional estimates of men ; 
 respecting success, cultivating 
 those who may advantage us, 
 forming business connections. 
 We learn, too, a larger charity, 
 and discover good in people 
 whom we once thought in- 
 tolerable. We discipline our 
 instincts, teaching them to like 
 here and dislike there. But 
 alas for the unconsidering, un- 
 hesitating scorn or enthusiasm 
 of our college days, when every- 
 one was either " a perfectly 
 bully fellow " or else " a beastly 
 pill!" 
 
EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 F a varied and painful 
 experience entitles one 
 to speak, I may reckon 
 myself an authority in this 
 branch of the curriculum. I 
 have eaten, or striven to eat, 
 at fourteen different mangers 
 in the City of Elms. There 
 are houses in many streets 
 which I cannot pass even now 
 without a feeling of indiges- 
 tion. 
 
 My initiation into college 
 eating-clubs happened in the 
 fall of 1865, in my Freshman 
 year. Our first steward was 
 a man who had been reared 
 
EA 
 
 on the sandiest pao'l oi Ltong 
 Island. He sailed over to 
 college in an oyster sharpie, 
 and, having lived mainly on 
 codfish, his notions of a bill 
 of fare were colored by early 
 prejudice. On our breakfast 
 table the succulent fishball 
 of commerce alternated with 
 " picked-up " codfish. For 
 dinner the cod was sometimes 
 boiled and sometimes it was 
 baked and stuffed, thus giving 
 a cheerful variety to the menu. 
 Our steward, as we afterward 
 learned, was a poet. He had 
 written an epic in numerous 
 cantos, the manuscript of 
 which nearly filled his trunk. 
 He read selections from it to 
 a member of the club, who 
 reported it as containing a 
 description of Aurora driving 
 
: 02 EA TING- <:L UBS. 
 
 her steeds up the eastern sky. 
 He never showed me this 
 poem, but one evening he 
 came into my room with a 
 rolling eye and asked me to 
 suggest the name of some 
 bird in two syllables, with the 
 accent on the first syllable. 
 He wanted it for a description 
 of evening, thus: 
 
 The dew-drops drip, the moon is dim, 
 The flits from limb to limb. 
 
 It must be a bird of nocturnal 
 habits, and he sternly rejected 
 " swallow/' " blue-jay," and 
 several others which I pro- 
 posed, as untrue to the orni- 
 thological requirements of 
 the case. My chum then sug- 
 gested "owl," as being beyond 
 all question a bird of night, 
 and explained that it might 
 
EA TING- CL UBS. 103 
 
 be stretched into two syllables 
 for the nonce, so as to be 
 pronounced " owel." The poet 
 doubted whether poetic license 
 could extend so far; besides, 
 he had already used " owl " in 
 a previous stanza. Finally, I 
 said that I knew of one bird 
 which might answer to wit, 
 the night-hawk. I was not cer- 
 tain whether it was accustomed 
 to flit from limb to limb, but I 
 knew that it flew up into the 
 sky at twilight, and then open- 
 ing its mouth, dropped down 
 about forty feet, producing a 
 booming sound which was 
 highly impressive. But he 
 shook his head sadly as he left 
 the room, saying that he was 
 afraid he could not get all that 
 into the stanza without alter- 
 ing several lines, which would 
 
104 EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 cause him a great deal of 
 labor. 
 
 We wished that the dinners 
 which the poet provided for 
 us might display a bolder 
 imagination than they did ; 
 but at the end of three weeks 
 he announced that he was los- 
 ing money, and the club dis- 
 banded. He himself fled over 
 the wan water to his island 
 home, but left behind him an 
 immortal fame ; for it was 
 he who, in Horace recitation, 
 translated that passage in " Ad 
 Fontem Bandusiae" 
 
 amabile 
 Fessis vomere tauris 
 
 as "a pleasing place for the 
 tired bullocks to vomit." 
 
 One of the members of this 
 club came from the anthracite 
 
EA TING- CL UBS. IO5 
 
 regions of Pennsylvania. He 
 ate with his knife, and his 
 grammar was none of the best. 
 My chum, who was a fastidious 
 man, was made unhappy by 
 his presence at the table. He 
 always spoke of him to me as 
 " the coal-heaver," and some- 
 times he w r ould correct his 
 English, saying, " Plum, in my 
 country we pronounce that 
 word calm not cam "; or, 
 " Plum, in good society the 
 past tense of the verb see is 
 usually saw not seen'' At 
 last the coal-heaver threatened 
 to punch my chum's head, and 
 the latter withdrew from the 
 club a week before it broke up. 
 At the end of Freshman year 
 he even withdrew from college 
 altogether, and sought the more 
 congenial soil of Harvard. He 
 
1 06 EA TING- CL UBS. 
 
 really could not stay at Yale 
 any longer and preserve his 
 self-respect. At Junior exhibi- 
 tion, he asserted, one of the 
 speakers had said " tremenjus," 
 and yet the audience had re- 
 mained quietly in their seats. 
 What would Dr. Holmes have 
 said to this ? 
 
 In Junior year, when my 
 division-officer told me I had 
 sixty-four marks, and urged 
 my temporary retirement from 
 New Haven, I took occasion to 
 visit my quondam chum at Cam- 
 bridge. He and his friends 
 were very hospitable, and 
 kindly did everything to make 
 my stay pleasant. At the club 
 where he boarded, the young 
 gentlemen addressed each other 
 not as " Skinny " or " Lippus," 
 nor even as " Tom " or " Dick/' 
 
EA TING-CLUBS. 107 
 
 but more politely, as " Thomas " 
 and " Richard. " I asked my 
 chum whether sometimes in 
 the lonely watches of the night, 
 when he lay awake and com- 
 muned with his soul, he did not 
 regret having exchanged the 
 freedom of Yale manners for a 
 stateof societywhere fellowssaid 
 " demme ! " when they wanted 
 to swear, and where they called 
 one another by the unabbrevi- 
 ated names which their spon- 
 sors did give them in baptism. 
 
 But he answered, " No ; cer- 
 tainly not. Thebes," he said: 
 
 " Thebes did his raw, unknowing youth 
 
 engage : 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age." 
 
 And he alluded sadly to the 
 coal-heaver as a representative 
 Yale man. 
 
108 EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 I next joined a club where 
 my sodales were mostly An- 
 dover boys. The place of our 
 sufferings was a house at the 
 corner of High and Elm streets, 
 where the Peabody now stands. 
 " The great university has since 
 planted its stone foot over all 
 that region." The house was 
 famous in tradition as the spot 
 where the Crocodile Club used 
 to feedj one of whose members 
 shot the fireman in '58, as is 
 duly set forth in that graceful 
 work of fiction, " Four Years at 
 Yale." But in our Freshman 
 year the building was mainly 
 noted as the headquarters of 
 Bill Henderson's faction our 
 member from Kentucky, who 
 had rooms upstairs. 
 
 Bill's apartment was like the 
 bothie of a Highland chief. 
 
EATING-CLUBS. log 
 
 During the day there were 
 seldom less than a dozen of 
 his clan on hand, and at night 
 about six retainers slept on 
 different parts of the floor or 
 furniture. The great South- 
 west was largely represented. 
 There were T., the Texan 
 ranger, and B., the bushwhacker 
 of Boone County, who fell 
 alas! too early lost in the grand 
 rush by Trinity Church, besides 
 many others from the border 
 States to the Gulf. Some of 
 these gentlemen had fought 
 in the late unpleasantness on 
 the Union side, and some on 
 the Confederate ; but in Bill's 
 room they met on common 
 ground to play auction pitch 
 for banana stakes, and to talk 
 over those college politics in 
 which the comparatively unim- 
 
HO EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 portant issues of the Civil War 
 were forgotten. It was here 
 that the great coalition was 
 hatched between Psi Upsilon 
 and Alpha Delta Phi, which 
 convulsed the class for several 
 terms. 
 
 A flavor of old rye pervaded 
 the air. If you sat down any- 
 where, you sat on a pipe, a 
 "pony," or a pack of cards. 
 It was always a mystery how 
 or when the frequenters of 
 Bill's learned their lessons; 
 and, to do them justice, they 
 seldom did. There was an air 
 of infinite leisure till someone 
 happening to look at his watch 
 would say, " By thunder, boys, 
 it's ten minutes to recitation!" 
 Then the cards would be 
 thrown on the floor, Bulger 
 would cease his strumming on 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. Ill 
 
 the banjo, and a general cry 
 would go up, " Where's my 
 pony?" And there would be 
 a scattering to various rooms 
 in the neighborhood in search 
 of someone to read out the 
 lesson. 
 
 The Andover club proving 
 too expensive, I next resorted 
 to " Swish's," a huge hash- 
 house, or Theologischer Frei- 
 tisck, where the impecunious 
 Theolog jostled the impecuni- 
 ous Freshman. A chief dish 
 here was liver, from which 
 the club was nicknamed the 
 "livery stable." The tables 
 were long and crowded, and 
 it was with a painful anxiety 
 that we at the lower end . 
 watched the slow progress 
 down the board of the maiden 
 who came bearing the plate of 
 
112 EA TING-CL UBS. 
 
 hot breakfast cakes in that too, 
 too brief interval between the 
 first and second prayer-bells. 
 Our steward was a medical 
 student who was playfully 
 called the Unjust Steward, 
 or sometimes the Knave of 
 Clubs. He is now no more ; 
 and I can say, without one 
 revengeful thought, " Peace to 
 his hashes! " 
 
 About this time I heard that 
 a club was being formed on an 
 economical plan, designed to 
 furnish good plain board, with- 
 out desserts of pastry and such 
 flummery. I threw in my for- 
 tunes with the reformers. The 
 purveyor's name was not Sar- 
 dine, but he was so called by 
 the irreverent, who also spoke 
 of the club as "the sardine 
 box." Our diet here would 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 1 1 3 
 
 have pleased Dr. Graham or 
 Mr. Bronson Alcott. Cracked 
 wheat and other kinds of 
 chicken feed abounded. Flesh 
 appeared mostly in the some- 
 what indirect forms of bologna 
 sausage and mutton broth. 
 The home of the club was a 
 cellar in College Street, and the 
 scene at meal times is not in- 
 aptly described in Sydney 
 Smith's picture of Rogers' din- 
 ner party " Darkness and 
 gnashing of teeth." 
 
 Perhaps it was due to the 
 area of depression in which our 
 dining room was situated that 
 there was so little conversation 
 at this club. The silence was 
 broken only by a person from 
 Vermont, who called out now 
 and then, " Parse the sweet'- 
 nin'." My right-hand neighbor 
 
114 EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 was a man of fierce and gloomy 
 temperament, and, as he walked 
 back to college after dinner, he 
 used to revile the fare most 
 bitterly. He called the club a 
 cracker club, and the basement 
 dining room he spoke of as 
 " that blank cracker hole," and 
 he threatened to leave. I was 
 constrained to admit that the 
 cracker played too large a part 
 in our repasts. But my left- 
 hand neighbor, who had served 
 in the army, took the military 
 view of the situation. He said, 
 " Fatwood, you talk like a man 
 with wooden teeth. We've 
 agreed to try this experiment 
 of a mess at four dollars and 
 thirty cents a week, and you 
 ought to stick to the flag and 
 not back out, at least before 
 the close of the term." 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 115 
 
 "You take that ground," 
 retorted Fatwood, " because 
 Sardine is a Gamma Nu man. 
 It's a Gamma Nu hole, any- 
 way. Just look at the crowd, 
 will you ? B. and I are the only 
 Sigma Eps men in it." 
 
 (I ought to explain that 
 Gamma Nu and Sigma Epsilon 
 were rival debating societies 
 of Freshman year. I am told 
 that they no longer exist. I 
 hope that they did not die 
 without first settling the ques- 
 tion, " Whether the Indian or 
 the negro had suffered most at 
 the hands of the white man.") 
 
 One by one the members of 
 the cracker club paid their bills 
 like the Arabs, and silently 
 stole away. The Major re- 
 mained, like Casabianca, at the 
 post of duty whence all but 
 
1 1 6 EA TING-CL UBS. 
 
 him had fled all but him and 
 the steward. He confided to 
 me afterward that his hunger 
 during the last week or two 
 was awful. 
 
 In Sophomore year a few of 
 us embarked upon the enter- 
 prise of a select club which 
 should give really good board 
 at a moderate price. The 
 steward was enthusiastic. He 
 knew it could be done. He 
 showed us figures which proved 
 that the club could be run in 
 such a way as to enrich the 
 landlady without either starv- 
 ing or impoverishing the 
 boarders. We were young and 
 sanguine, and we tried the ex- 
 periment. We called our club, 
 somewhat boastfully, "The 
 House of Lords," a title 
 which looked swell in the Yale 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 1 1 7 
 
 Banner. At the end of three 
 weeks the steward broke his 
 leg, and was put to bed in the 
 room next to our dining room, 
 where his groans made an ap- 
 petizing accompaniment to the 
 meals. We resolved to go on 
 with the club notwithstanding, 
 taking the stewardship turn and 
 turn about. At the end of the 
 term we cast up accounts, and 
 found that we were ruined. By 
 this time the steward had re- 
 covered the use of his limbs, 
 and wanted us to continue the 
 experiment. He explained to 
 us why it had failed hitherto 
 and why under his manage- 
 ment it was sure to succeed in 
 the future. But we had had 
 enough of it. 
 
 From the House of Lords I 
 fell to the Commons. Here I 
 
1 1 8 EA TING- CL UBS. 
 
 found a strangely mixed com- 
 pany. Most of the patients 
 had gone there, like myself, 
 out of premeditated poverty; 
 but others were there as in a 
 sort of purgatory, doing pen- 
 ance for the extravagances of 
 first term and hoping to get out 
 again as soon as the governor 
 should send a check. Nu Tau 
 Phi bummers were there, ex- 
 members of the " Pie Club/* or 
 of the " Twelve Apostles," who 
 had wasted their substance at 
 poker or at Eli's billiard tables, 
 or who, having bet on the 
 Yale crew at Worcester, had 
 borrowed large sums to pay up 
 with and were now living on 
 the interest of their debts. 
 They generally held out but a 
 few weeks at the Commons, 
 where the only thing eatable or 
 
EATING-CLUBS. HQ 
 
 drinkable was the milk. And 
 finally this began to taste of 
 onions. I inquired of my 
 neighbor a philosopher who 
 had long frequented the Com- 
 mons why this was thus, and 
 he told me that the cows in 
 certain swampy pastures ate 
 greedily of a species of wild 
 garlic. He mentioned that the 
 botanical name of this inter- 
 esting vegetable was A Ilium 
 vine ale ; and he added that he 
 had become, through use and 
 wont, rather fond of a slight 
 flavor of onion in his milk. 
 
 My distinguished classmate 
 the author of " Four Years at 
 Yale," and formerly the first pen 
 in Philately on the American 
 continent, lodged nearly oppo- 
 site the college Commons, and 
 he used to allege with that ex- 
 
120 EA TING- CL UBS. 
 
 aggeration which is said to be 
 the characteristic of American 
 humor that every day, after 
 dinner, ambulances drove up to 
 the Commons door to take 
 away the boarders who were 
 weak from hunger and unable 
 to walk.* 
 
 In Junior year a number of 
 us made up a table for German 
 conversation and boarded with 
 Herr Deining a name pleas- 
 antly suggestive of the twofold 
 object of the club. To stimu- 
 late ourselves to the acquire- 
 ment of the foreign tongue in 
 question, we made a rule that 
 whoever spoke English at table 
 should pay a fine of five cents a 
 
 * " Triennial Pome ": 
 4 ' The other evening, just when tea is o'er 
 And ambulances crowd the Commons 
 door," etc. 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 121 
 
 word. In consequence of this 
 a profound stillness reigned, 
 broken only by such colloquial 
 idioms as, " Wollen Sie noch 
 ein Sttickchen Fleisch, Herr 
 C. ? " or, " Bitt' urn das Brod, 
 Herr D." We called ourselves 
 " Die Junggesellen," which was 
 generally interpreted by our 
 classmates as " The Young 
 Gazelles." If few of us ac- 
 quired a taste for our host's 
 Kartoffel-salad and Apfel- 
 kucken, we were at any rate 
 grateful to him forasmuch as 
 he never employed his carving- 
 knife as a toothpick a thing 
 that actually happened at an- 
 other German club that I knew 
 of. 
 
 The last college eating-club 
 that I belonged to was the 
 " Water Club/' formed in third 
 
122 EA TING- CL UBS. 
 
 term Senior. The name re- 
 ferred, not to the club's temper- 
 ance principles, but to its chief 
 article of food. Other dishes 
 than water did appear on the 
 table, but were seldom dis- 
 turbed. This was an economical 
 arrangement for the landlady, 
 who was thereby enabled to 
 put the same roast before us 
 on several successive days. It 
 was apropos of such a reappear- 
 ance that Cheir the Great used 
 to say to the waiter, " This din- 
 ner has been eaten once. Take 
 it away ! take it away ! " 
 Cheir was the autocrat of our 
 breakfast table a portly swell, 
 with a striking likeness to 
 George IV. He afterward be- 
 came a ritualist minister,and was 
 known as the " wickedest theo- 
 log." As such he used to wear 
 
EA TING- CL UBS. 1 2 3 
 
 a high clerical vest, buttoning 
 to the throat, and he would 
 recommend the fashion to his 
 friends, saying, " Perfectly bully 
 thing to save wash bills. 
 Don't have to wear any shirt. 
 Just button your collar on a 
 wart on your neck, and every- 
 one thinks you've got a shirt 
 on." 
 
 The mention of Cheir re- 
 minds me of the conversation 
 at our club tables. It was very 
 bad. The undergraduate news- 
 papers which kindly help the 
 Faculty to carry on the college 
 had a stereotyped editorial on 
 this subject. They attributed 
 the poor quality of college 
 table talk to the marking sys- 
 tem. Perhaps it was the mark- 
 ing system, but at the clubs 
 where I boarded any allusion 
 
124 EA TING-CL UBS. 
 
 to the " curric " was promptly 
 resented with cries of " Fen 
 shop! Fen shop!"* The 
 Gamma Nu club, composed of 
 " digs," was in some sort an ex- 
 ception ; but even there the 
 references to the intellectual 
 occupations of student life sel- 
 dom took a higher flight than, 
 " They say Smith is ahead for 
 the Valedictory: Brown has 
 made two flunks this term/' 
 Or, " Do you feel good to- 
 night? made three rushes to- 
 day? Awful tough lesson in 
 spherics for to-morrow," etc. 
 
 At many of the clubs the 
 favorite talk was of the nature 
 of " gags," so called. For ex- 
 ample, A., glancing over the 
 
 * 7. e., I defend or forbid (French dt- 
 fendre), as in the game of marbles, 
 " Fen ebbs ! " or " Fen drops ! " 
 
EATING-CLUBS. 12$ 
 
 morning paper at breakfast, 
 would say to B., his fellow-con- 
 spirator, " Queer thing about 
 that man in Hartford. " 
 
 On which B., assisting in the 
 plot, would ask, " What man ? " 
 
 Whereto A. would reply, 
 " Why, that man that's been 
 lying two days in the street, 
 and the Catholics won't let him 
 be buried." 
 
 Upon which C, an unwary 
 third party, would inquire, 
 " Why won't they let him be 
 buried ? " 
 
 A.: " Because he isn't dead." 
 
 Omnes (gleefully) : " Gag on 
 C.! Sold again, C.! Drinks for 
 the crowd." 
 
 C.: " Not at all a gag ! not at 
 all ! He said ' that dead man ' ; 
 leave it to anybody if he didn't 
 say dead man." 
 
126 A TING- CL UBS. 
 
 And the rest of the meal- 
 time would be taken up by dis- 
 cussions as to whether the gag 
 had been fairly " got " on C. or 
 not. 
 
 Another common diversion 
 was to hunt up and bring in 
 *' fat words," as they were 
 called. A., for example, would 
 begin, " I came across an 
 awfully fat word this morn- 
 i ng scrannel. ' ' 
 
 At this, many voices would 
 cry, " Scrannel ! Scrannel isn't 
 fat; scrannel is old/' 
 
 A.: "Well, what does it 
 mean, then ? Come now, what 
 does it mean ? Bet you a dollar 
 you never saw it before." 
 
 " Bet you five dollars I've seen 
 it a dozen times," shout several. 
 
 A.: " Now, there's where I've 
 got you. It doesn't occur a 
 
EA TING- CL UBS. 1 2 7 
 
 dozen times in the English lan- 
 guage ; it's an ct7ta% Xeyoj*8- 
 vov." 
 
 Chorus : " Bet you on that ! 
 Bet you you don't know what 
 an a.7ta% Xsyojterov is." 
 
 And one rival philologist is 
 heard above the din, proclaim- 
 ing, " No, no : scrannel isn't fat, 
 but here's a fat one: bisson 
 bisson rheum." 
 
 " Bisson be d d ! " retorts 
 
 A.; and so it goes on. 
 
 One of our number, whom 
 we called Nestor by reason of 
 his great age, used to remon- 
 strate against this sort of thing. 
 " Come now, fellows," he would 
 say, " what kind of talk is this 
 for educated gentlemen ? Why 
 can't we have some really im- 
 proving conversation, instead 
 of such rot ? " 
 
I2& EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 It is perhaps needless to say 
 that this venerable man became 
 at once the favorite target for 
 gags. And, whenever the fire 
 of small-talk languished, some- 
 one would say, " Nestor, start 
 some interesting and profitable 
 topic of conversation." 
 
 Food and manners at college 
 tables have both, I doubt not, 
 greatly ameliorated with the 
 progress of civilization in the 
 university. One need not be 
 precisely the oldest living gradu- 
 ate, nor even have reached that 
 hoary eld which entitles the 
 alumnus to " reminisce " at Com- 
 mencement dinners, in order to 
 recognize the change. Some of 
 us who are beginning, as Harry 
 Brown used to say, to " brush 
 our foreheads over our back 
 hair," are old enough to con- 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 1 29 
 
 trast the present luxuries of 
 undergraduate life with the 
 hardships that we bore in the 
 consulship of Plancus. I ques- 
 tion whether this generation of 
 students can even conceive of 
 the hardness and steep pitch of 
 the seats in the old chapel. 
 There were no steam heaters, 
 no water, no gas in our dormi- 
 tories. The yearly arson of the 
 North coal-yard was felt to be 
 an all too slight revenge on the 
 authorities for the discomforts 
 that we endured. 
 
 Many a winter midnight, 
 when the lights were out in the 
 college row and Orion possessed 
 the zenith, I have filled my 
 earthen water-jug at the wooden 
 pump behind old Divinity, when 
 the ground about that classic 
 fountain was like an Alpine 
 
130 EATING-CLUBS. 
 
 glacier of uncommon steepness, 
 while the aerometer on top of 
 Alumni Hall uttered a low, 
 monotonous note, as though 
 the spirit of some old chapel 
 organist were experimenting on 
 the bass stop of his ghostly 
 instrument. 
 
 And how well I remember 
 our Sophomore room on the 
 ground floor of North College ! 
 The entry was like the cavern 
 of the winds. All night long 
 the big hall-doors slammed to 
 and fro and shook the building. 
 And every Tuesday about 
 I A. M., the D. K. E. Society 
 did us the honor to tramp 
 through the entry in solid 
 phalanx, shouting an emphatic 
 chorus which began, " Rip! 
 slap ! here we are again ! " 
 (" Yes, d n you ! there you 
 
EA TING-CL UBS. 1 3 1 
 
 are again ! " my chum would 
 say with a groan), and waking 
 the echo that lived between the 
 Treasury and the windows of 
 our bedroom. Often in the 
 morning, when we opened our 
 door, there would tumble into 
 the room a tall snow-drift which 
 had piled up during the night 
 on the brick floor of the hall- 
 way. 
 
 Now the floor is of wood, the 
 New Zealander ponders over 
 the ruins of South Pump, and 
 nothing is left for the lover of 
 the past but to mourn the lost 
 simplicity of college life and to 
 breathe a hope that the volup- 
 tuous fare of the New Haven 
 House or the University Club 
 may not unfit the Senior for 
 that wrestle with New York 
 boarding-houses which certainly 
 
132 EA TING-CL UBS. 
 
 awaits him when he graduates 
 and joins the innumerable cara- 
 van that moves to the Columbia 
 Law School the common goal 
 of all Yalensians. 
 
LEAVES FROM THE DIARY 
 OF AN UNDERGRADUATE. 
 
 FEBRUARY 2, 18 . 
 |]HE physics lectures this 
 term are very interest- 
 ing. This morning the 
 lecturer happened to select 
 the sunny-haired Xanthus as 
 the corpus vile of his electri- 
 cal experiments. The victim 
 mounted the glass-legged in- 
 sulating stool with a confident 
 grin, but when the battery got 
 in its work on him, his expres- 
 sion changed. His rich auburn 
 mat stood up on end in a circu- 
 lar aureole, under which his 
 convulsed and livid features 
 133 
 
1 34 DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA D UA TE. 
 
 showed like the face of a pre- 
 Raphaelite saint against a nim- 
 bus of old-gold. The professor 
 smiled, and even the ranks of 
 Tuscany the red-heads of the 
 Third Division, known in his- 
 tory as " The Old Brick Row " 
 could scarce forbear to cheer. 
 But the bottle which was to 
 have been exhausted of air, 
 and then crushed by the pres- 
 sure of the outside atmosphere, 
 had some flaw in it. It 
 wouldn't crush. The lecturer 
 and his colored assistant re- 
 lieved each other in vain at the 
 air pump. Bets were freely 
 laid in whispers with odds 
 in favor of the bottle. At last 
 the harrowing struggle was 
 abandoned. Hudson who is 
 not devoid of a certain spright- 
 liness was afterward heard to 
 
DIA RY OF AN UNDER GRA DUATE. 135 
 
 say that the receiver was less 
 exhausted than the darky. 
 Beverley to whom nothing 
 human is alien lingered after 
 the lecture, and asked the pro- 
 fessor whether this experiment 
 was designed to illustrate the 
 strength of materials. He also 
 expressed sympathy with the 
 assistant. He found the latter 
 to be a practical philosopher, 
 who regarded his chief's 
 methods of breaking glass as 
 needlessly indirect. 
 
 "Break 'em easy 'nough, 
 take a hatchet," was his com- 
 ment. 
 
 " Formerly a boy was used," 
 said the lecturer, in explaining 
 the self-adjusting valve of the 
 steam engine, and his counte- 
 nance wore a pitying smile at 
 the rudeness of the contriv- 
 
I3 6 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUATE. 
 
 ance. But on going to my 
 room after the lecture, I was 
 annoyed to find one of those 
 obsolete pieces of machinery 
 waiting for me at the door 
 with a tailor's bill. How much 
 more delicate and impersonal 
 would have been a simple, self- 
 adjusting valve, with bill at- 
 tached, hanging from the door- 
 knob ! 
 
 FEBRUARY 17. 
 
 Attended the afternoon lec- 
 ture on the metric system of 
 weights and measures, and 
 made the following entry (origi- 
 nal) in my notebook : " There is 
 no use in trying to bring home 
 the metric system to the great 
 heart of the people, until our 
 proverbs and even our English 
 classics have been amended in 
 
DIA RY OF AN UND ERGRADUATE. 137 
 
 the interest of the reform, 
 thus: 
 
 A miss is as good as a kilometer (approxi- 
 mate). 
 
 A gram of prevention is worth a deca- 
 gram of cure. 
 
 '* Aye, every centimeter a king ! " Lear. 
 
 FEBRUARY 22. 
 
 The birthday of George 
 Washington ! Watson told me 
 that it was rumored in well- 
 informed circles that Higginson 
 had this morning unearthed 
 again the fur cap with a knob 
 on top which he used to wear 
 at the Grammar School, and 
 subsequently here through his 
 first winter. Calling at Higgin- 
 son's room last Tuesday, I 
 found his chum and a few 
 sympathizing friends sitting 
 around the grate and feeding 
 the flames with a collection of 
 
1 3 8 DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA D UA TE. 
 
 Higginson's head-gear. I saw 
 them burn : 
 
 ist. The green plaid cap with 
 patent-leather frontispiece. 
 
 2d. The black cloth hat with 
 exposed wire rim, which gave 
 so much offense in Sophomore 
 year. 
 
 3d. The felt "Monitor" 
 with the hole in the apex, 
 through which the sunlight 
 twinkled. 
 
 But the fur cap was not 
 among them, and there is too 
 much ground for the fear that 
 it escaped the holocaust, and 
 that Watson's information is 
 true. 
 
 MARCH 4. 
 
 There is some excitement 
 over the suspension of Punder- 
 son, the class poet. The fel- 
 lows have been in the habit of 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 139 
 
 sending him little pencil notes 
 in recitation, begging for odes, 
 etc., to while away the tedium 
 of the hour. G. Home was 
 especially importunate in these 
 requests. Finally, to him too 
 much demanding, the odist, 
 after a short frenzy on the front 
 bench, returned the following 
 answer, written on a blank leaf 
 torn from his text-book : 
 
 To MAECENAS. 
 
 Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Apollo. 
 
 G. Home, you seem to think, by , 
 
 That Homer doesn't ever nod. 
 
 You'll find, if once your hand you try, 
 
 That writing endless poetry 
 
 *'s Not half so easy as you think. 
 
 It needs good f smear, cigars, and drink 
 
 To get a high-toned frenzy up : 
 
 The Muse is dull without the cup. 
 
 * Cf. Horace. . . u- 
 
 xorius amnis. 
 \ Academice food. 
 
140 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 Who eats at Commons Club his dinner 
 Will find his wit grow thin and thinner. 
 Maecenas, set 'em * upward straight, 
 Or for your odes in vain you'll wait. 
 
 The eagle eye of the instruct- 
 or lit on this manuscript gem 
 as it was passing from hand to 
 hand along the benches toward 
 G. Home. He arrested it and 
 read it. Its sentiments and 
 language were both too im- 
 proper to be overlooked, and 
 Punderson is now absent tem- 
 porarily from these shades. 
 
 APRIL 7. 
 
 Father writes that he is glad 
 I am keeping a diary. He says 
 it is a valuable habit, and good 
 practice in writing. I am to 
 bring it home vacations and 
 show it to him, that he may see 
 
 * Pocula largiter superposuit. 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA 7E. 141 
 
 what reflections are suggested 
 to me by the studies of the col- 
 lege course, etc. Mem. Brace 
 on reflections. To-day Watson 
 tells me another painful rumor 
 is in circulation about Higgin- 
 son. It is said that his watch 
 has come back. It is a pewter 
 bull's-eye, about the size of a 
 warming-pan, and with several 
 coats, like an onion. He can 
 do all sorts of tricks with it. 
 He can strip off the outer peels 
 and throw the nucleus around 
 the room without hurting it. 
 He can touch it off in some 
 way, with a buzz, and it will do 
 the twenty-four hours inside 
 a minute. It was always at 
 the blacksmith's, however, no 
 watchmaker would touch it, 
 being repaired ; and Watson 
 says it costs Higginson more to 
 
1 42 DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA D UA TE. 
 
 keep it than it would to keep a 
 horse. Fellows that H. owed 
 money to were relieved to hear 
 that he lost it at Forepaugh's 
 menagerie last week. But it 
 seems that he advertised it, and 
 it was returned by a heavy man 
 with a large foot, who had 
 trodden on it before picking it 
 up. It was quite flat when 
 brought back, but Higginson 
 paid the man a liberal reward, 
 and is having it hammered back 
 into shape. 
 
 APRIL 10. 
 
 To-day being Saturday, I was 
 going to attend a cocking-main 
 given by Hudson in the attic 
 of North College, but it failed 
 to come off. Hudson had 
 bought four birds from Epaph- 
 roditus, the negro costermonger 
 the same one who was hired 
 
DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA D UA TE. 143 
 
 for five dollars by some of the 
 fellows in Sophomore year to 
 have an epileptic fit in the 
 gallery of Music Hall during a 
 temperance lecture, and was 
 carried out howling and foam- 
 ing at the mouth. The birds 
 were secured two days in 
 advance, and were put in Hud- 
 son's coal-closet ; where, in the 
 words of Daniel Pratt, 
 
 " The light of day 
 Shines but seldom, or not at all, 
 On the course of the awful water-fall." 
 
 It was feared that the dark 
 might impair their gameness, 
 and so they were removed to 
 the garret yesterday afternoon. 
 But one of them, which was 
 thin, squeezed out of the coop, 
 and appeared this morning 
 at the attic window, where it 
 
144 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 crowed repeatedly and attracted 
 the notice of the authorities, 
 who confiscated the whole 
 plant. 
 
 APRIL 13. 
 
 Forensic disputations this 
 morning. A good grind on 
 Featherstone ! He had furn- 
 ished a forensic to Rosenberg, 
 whose invention is not fertile. 
 When Rosy meekly read it 
 through with that sweet Penn- 
 sylvania accent which secured 
 him in Freshman year the nick- 
 name " White-ammed Nau- 
 sic^a," the affable Professor of 
 Belles Lettres remarked, " You 
 didn't pay much for that, did 
 you ? " 
 
 APRIL 15. 
 
 Linonia prize debate this 
 evening. I went in to hear 
 Watson speak his little piece. 
 
DIA R Y OF A N- UttDERGRA D UA TE. 145 
 
 He had read parts of it to me 
 beforehand, and I told him he 
 was cock-sure of first prize. 
 The question was, " Are penal 
 colonies justifiable ? " and there 
 were some very luscious pas- 
 sages in Watson's speech, in 
 which he called Botany Bay a 
 loathsome plague spot, a cess- 
 pool, a seething caldron of vice 
 and a mass of festering corrup- 
 tion. He took only a third 
 prize, but the fellows, most of 
 them, thought he ought to have 
 had the first. His language 
 was certainly very strong. 
 
 Yesterday morning Watson 
 was rehearsing his piece in his 
 room. In the midst of a beauti- 
 ful description of Russian con- 
 victs passing through the Ural 
 Mountains, one of his gestures 
 upset the water-pan on the 
 
14^ DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA D UA T. 
 
 stove and spilled its contents 
 over the feet of his chum, 
 Dempster, who was smoking 
 near by. The latter has since 
 remained in his room, with 
 bandaged feet, and Watson 
 carries his meals to him from 
 the club. I was telling Higgin- 
 son about the accident this 
 A. M., but he smiled knowingly 
 and said : 
 
 " Do you really imagine that 
 the water was hot ? I have sat 
 on Watson's stove half an hour 
 at a time without singeing my 
 pantaloons, and watched the 
 low-spirited thermometer in the 
 corner trying to climb up to 
 65. No ; Dempster's feet are 
 not scalded. It is all a ruse to 
 get up a reputation for the 
 stove, which they are trying to 
 sell. Observe the ostentatious 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 147 
 
 manner in which Watson carries 
 the meals. It is done to pro- 
 voke inquiry/' 
 
 I told Watson this afternoon 
 what Higginson had said, and 
 he answered : 
 
 " Higginson is embittered by 
 my exposure of his watch and 
 his bad hats, and is, therefore, 
 not to be trusted. If you 
 doubt me, come and sit on the 
 stove yourself/' 
 
 APRIL 1 8. 
 
 The financial panic in the 
 class has passed its crisis. Last 
 term the little busy B. compiled 
 an " Index to the Yale Literary 
 Magazine," which he foisted 
 upon a reluctant public at fifty 
 cents a copy, exacting payment 
 in advance of publication. 
 Pending the appearance of this 
 
I4 8 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 valuable guide to the treasures 
 of genius buried in the Li., 
 each subscriber received a ticket 
 entitling the holder to one copy 
 of the " Index " as soon as it 
 should be issued. These choses 
 in action, being negotiable, got 
 into circulation in the class, 
 and were used in the payment 
 of debts and otherwise. They 
 began to depreciate rapidly, and 
 were finally bought up by one 
 speculator, and employed as 
 poker chips by the gamblers of 
 South College, being redeemed 
 at eleven cents apiece, or 
 twenty-two per cent., on their 
 face value. The Courant now 
 asserts that B. is trying to bull 
 the market by threatening to 
 issue a limited edition of the 
 "Index" and retain five hun- 
 dred copies for his own use. 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 149 
 
 APRIL 23. 
 
 Spring vacation to-morrow. 
 Have been packing my trunk all 
 the afternoon. I think, on the 
 whole, I won't take this diary 
 home, but will give father my 
 reflections on the studies of 
 the term, etc., orally. 
 
 MAY 17. 
 
 Last night I was initiated 
 into the Red Letter Club- 
 nicknamed by outsiders " The 
 Dead Letter Club." Father 
 wrote last week, giving his con- 
 sent to my joining the club. 
 He objects to the Greek letter 
 societies as frivolous and a 
 waste of time ; but he cordially 
 approved my entering an as- 
 sociation whose object is de- 
 fined by the constitution a 
 noble instrument as " the cul- 
 
150 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 ture of the mind and the mutual 
 improvement of the members, 
 socially, intellectually, and 
 morally." 
 
 The meetings are held at 
 Mrs. Bruno's alehouse, a place 
 not as unspotted of the world 
 as the President's lecture room, 
 but very respectable for an 
 alehouse. I was told to report 
 there at 8 P. M. On entering 
 the taproom I was a little in 
 doubt, as there was no one there 
 but the usual barkeeper, with 
 red face and blue mustache. I 
 asked him if this was Mrs. Bru- 
 no's, and he answered with that 
 indirectness which I have no- 
 ticed in barkeepers (and which 
 is singularly like the responses 
 in the Greek tragic dialogue) : 
 
 " Wai, Bruno's the name on 
 the signboard, I guess." 
 
DIA K Y OF AN UNDERGRA D UA TE. 1 5 1 
 
 At this moment Hudson, 
 who is president of the club, 
 heard my voice, and opening 
 an inner door, beckoned me 
 into the snuggery. All the 
 members were present except 
 Watson, who came in late and 
 was fined fifty cents. I signed 
 my name to the constitution, 
 and took an iron-clad oath to 
 support it to the bloody end. 
 There were some Babylonish 
 red curtains at the window, 
 which lent a cheerful air to the 
 scene, but my feelings were 
 outraged by the mural decora- 
 tions a green and yellow 
 lithograph of the Prodigal Son 
 and a chromo of the Good 
 Samaritan pouring arnica into 
 the wounds of the man who fell 
 among thieves. 
 
 Dempster opened the literary 
 
152 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TJS. 
 
 exercises by reading an essay 
 on life insurance. He was fre- 
 quently interrupted by bursts 
 of applause. Impatient and 
 critical spirits solaced them- 
 selves during the reading by 
 munching the soothing almond 
 and raisin. But he was fol- 
 lowed by Higginson, who told 
 from memory De Quincey's 
 story of the " Spanish Nun/* 
 an affliction which lasted an 
 hour and a half, and which 
 neither sweetmeats nor stimu- 
 lants could mitigate. A con- 
 tribution was then read from 
 the Harvard Chapter, of which 
 I obtained a copy : 
 
 HORATIAN DIALOGUE. 
 
 LEWIS. 
 Walter, about your room you often tell, 
 
 To talk about your pictures never cease ; 
 But in one thing you'll own that I excel 
 I have a cattle piece. 
 
DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA DUATE. 153 
 
 WALTER. 
 
 Lewis, in vain you try to shake my mind 
 By saying this thing, which you hope is 
 new. 
 
 Unreasoning boaster, ignorant and blind, 
 I have one, too ! 
 
 LEWIS. 
 
 My cattle lie upon a gentle hill, 
 
 And calmly gaze into the distant west, 
 
 While the low sun shines on each glisten- 
 ing rill, 
 And sinks to rest. 
 
 WALTER. 
 
 Mine proudly stand upon the mountain 
 
 turf, 
 
 And view with wondering eyes the land- 
 scape wide, 
 
 Silently listening to the tumbling surf 
 On far-off ocean side. 
 
 LEWIS. 
 
 From this vain striving now let each one 
 
 cease ; 
 
 This much I own, your cattle piece is 
 fine. 
 
154 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 WALTER. 
 
 Well said, O friend : praise you your cat- 
 tle piece, 
 And I'll praise mine. 
 
 The MSS. are filed away in a 
 red box, labeled " Veal Cut- 
 lets/' A Hebe with a retrousse 
 nose then brought in the Welsh 
 rabbits. They were a little too 
 Welsh for me, and were made 
 of what our Sheffield member 
 called " granulated " cheese. 
 Not wishing to be unfaithful to 
 the traditions of the club, I ate 
 a rabbit and a half, and experi- 
 enced the most deplorable con- 
 sequences afterward. Nor 
 were the entire resources of 
 modern science applied to the 
 ventilation of the oyster pie 
 which followed. Watson in- 
 formed me that they once had 
 a roast duck, but the strain on 
 
DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA DUATE. 155 
 
 the resources of Mrs. Bruno's 
 cuisine had been awful. The 
 wine was an offense to taste a 
 North Carolina product known 
 as " Scuppernong." 
 
 The members of the club 
 then had the opportunity of 
 enjoying that inestimable privi- 
 lege the right of suffrage 
 in balloting for officers for the 
 ensuing year. The result was 
 announced amid the wildest 
 enthusiasm, and the idols of 
 popular favor received their 
 honors in the customary blush- 
 ing manner. 
 
 I have written to father for 
 the initiation fee (ten dollars), 
 saying that the exercises of the 
 club are of a most profitable 
 character, and that I feel my 
 mind already greatly improved. 
 
156 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 OCTOBER 13. 
 
 Rushton has been absent 
 from the class this term. Some 
 of the fellows saw him the 
 other day in the lower part of 
 the town, dragging a small go- 
 cart, full of packages. He ex- 
 plained that so many horses 
 were down with the epizootic, 
 that merchants had to hire men 
 to deliver parcels. So he had 
 become a horse, and he said 
 there was more money in it 
 than in being a Greek pony, at 
 fifty cents an hour, or writing 
 compositions on " The Law of 
 Decay in Nations," at two dol- 
 lars apiece, for men in the 
 third division. He will not re- 
 turn to college so long as his 
 job holds out to burn. 
 
DIA RY OF AN UNDERGRA DUATE. 157 
 
 OCTOBER 22. 
 
 Another good man gone ! 
 This time it is Gudgeon, the 
 Caliban with a pink beard, who 
 was imported last year from 
 somewhere in Boone County 
 by Henderson. Henderson has 
 always been rather anxious 
 about him. When he first 
 came up to be examined, he 
 was afraid that he might get 
 mad and lick some of the ex- 
 aminers if they asked him too 
 many questions. He said that 
 Gudgeon was a Southern boy, 
 and could cut and shoot, and 
 wouldn't stand any bigod 
 nonsense. 
 
 It seems that Gudgeon and 
 some others had been down 
 town, and came into the yard 
 about 1 1 P. M. feeling quite 
 racy. They made such happy 
 
158 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 noises that Barlow, who was 
 studying Conies in his room in 
 North Middle, opened his win- 
 dow and yelled out, " Get me 
 so ; I want to be so." This 
 woke Tutor Divitiacus known 
 as old Privative Entity who 
 watched the subsequent pro- 
 ceedings with interest. 
 
 The crowd then went down 
 to the fence, and, seeing a light 
 in Tuckerman's shop across the 
 street, they began to sing a 
 variation of the well known 
 German cradle song, " Schlaf, 
 Kindele, Schlaf." 
 
 ** Sleep, Tuckerman, sleep ! Sleep, 
 
 Tuckerman, sleep ! 
 Your oil and your chimneys will do 
 
 very well ; 
 Your matches won't light if you stick 
 
 'em in 
 
 " Sleep," etc. 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 1 59 
 
 The words are by Higginson, 
 whose big astral lamp which 
 he calls Pharos drinks so much 
 oil and breaks so many chim- 
 neys that he is dreadfully in debt 
 to Tuckerman. Tuckerman 
 lately refused him any further 
 credit, so Higginson wrote this 
 song for revenge, and has 
 trained a quartette to sing it. 
 
 Pretty soon Tuckerman's 
 light went out, and all the fel- 
 lows went off to bed except 
 Gudgeon and Nimrod. 
 
 The ironmonger opposite 
 South College uses his front 
 yard to advertise his wares. 
 On the door-steps is a pair of 
 " portal-warding lion-whelps." 
 On one side of the walk is a 
 deer with liver-colored mot- 
 tlings, and on the other a realis- 
 tic Newfoundland dog. In the 
 
l6o DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 center of the right-hand grass 
 plot is a bathukolpos sphinx 
 on a pedestal, and in the 
 centre of the left-hand plot an 
 ornamented fountain with gold- 
 fish. On the edge of the basin 
 squats a large green frog. This 
 is the third of the family, two 
 predecessors having been stolen 
 by Nimrod for memorabil. To 
 guard against further losses, the 
 ironmonger had had this one 
 riveted to the fountain by a 
 spike driven through its body. 
 But this fact was unknown to 
 Gudgeon. Nimrod was telling 
 him, as they sat on the fence, 
 of his capture of the two pre- 
 vious frogs, which he offered 
 to show him if he would come 
 to his room over the Old 
 Chapel some day, and look 
 over his collection. 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. l6l 
 
 The tale fired Gudgeon to 
 emulation. With a wild Boone 
 County whoop, he ran across 
 the street, vaulted the (iron) 
 fence and strove to tear the 
 reptile from its moorings. But 
 the frog like him of Calaveras 
 County " with fixed anchor 
 in his scaly rind/' refused to 
 budge. Gudgeon tugged and 
 pushed, and his imprecations 
 filled the night. Then, sud- 
 denly abandoning his first 
 design, he jumped into the 
 water and chased the gold fish 
 around the basin, clutching at 
 their darting forms in the 
 uncertain gleams of the gas- 
 lights which adorned the iron- 
 monger's gate-posts. It was 
 while he was thus engaged 
 that Tutor Divitiacus and 
 Policeman X. simultaneously, 
 
1 62 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 though not preconcertedly, 
 swooped upon him from oppo- 
 site sides. 
 
 NOVEMBER 8. 
 
 Gudgeon's suspension was 
 the subject of our table talk 
 to-day. Punderson, the class 
 poet, produced and read an 
 " Ode to the Frog of the Ban- 
 dusian Font." It began 
 
 "O hapless saurian. " 
 
 But Watson, who is in the 
 zoology elective and has been 
 vivisecting frogs all this term, 
 pointed out to Punderson that 
 he was way off in his natural 
 history ; and he changed it 
 accordingly to, 
 
 " O hoarse batrachian." 
 
 It came out that, on the night 
 after Gudgeon's adventure, 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 163 
 
 Hudson, who is full of merry 
 conceits, had taken a paint pot 
 and brush and painted two 
 inscriptions on the rim of the 
 fountain, one on each side of 
 the frog ; to wit : " Marry come 
 up ! " and " The iron hath 
 entered his soul.'* This had 
 embittered the monger, who 
 complained to the Faculty, 
 and Gudgeon was sacrificed. 
 Henderson reproached Hud- 
 for thus compromising Gud- 
 geon's case pendente lite. But 
 Hudson said he didn't think 
 Gudgeon was much of a loss 
 to the class anyway : he was a 
 very uncultivated man, called 
 his father his " paw," and pro- 
 nounced does " dooz." Hen- 
 derson retorted that Hudson 
 was pedantic and narrow- 
 minded, and very small in his 
 
164 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA T. 
 
 way of judging men. He 
 called him an iota subscript 
 and a microscopic siliceous 
 spiculum of a sponge, and said 
 that Gudgeon might be rough 
 in his ways, but he had a great 
 big soul. 
 
 It is reported that Gudgeon 
 is at Stamford, and that he 
 threatens to lick Tutor Divi- 
 tiacus as soon as his suspension 
 is over. 
 
 NOVEMBER 17. 
 
 The sensation of the day is 
 the appearance of Higginson in 
 a silk hat with a weed. It is 
 said that G. Home, who has 
 recently lost an uncle, went 
 down to the hatter's to get a 
 weed put on his hat. Higgin- 
 son happened to walk down 
 Chapel Street with him, and, 
 arrived at the hatter's, G. Home 
 
DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 165 
 
 urged him, almost with tears in 
 his eyes, to go inside with him 
 and get a new hat, discarding 
 the cap with a fur button on 
 top, which has made it so pain- 
 ful of late to associate much 
 with Higginson. 
 
 " Have some style about 
 you ! " implored G. Home. 
 
 "Well, what shall I get?" 
 asked Higginson. 
 
 "Get a tall hat, like mine," 
 said G. Home. 
 
 Higginson finally consented, 
 and the hat was bought. The 
 hatter asked G. Home how 
 wide he wanted his weed. Was 
 he in mourning for a very near 
 relative ? 
 
 " An uncle," answered G. 
 Home. 
 
 " Then about three inches 
 will be correct," said the hatter. 
 
166 DIARY OF AN UNDERGRADUA TE. 
 
 " Say," struck in Higginson, 
 " I believe you can put a weed 
 on mine, too. It makes a hat 
 look tony." 
 
 " Yes, sir," said the hatter : 
 " and what shall I make it ? " 
 
 " Oh, about an uncle," an- 
 swered Higginson. 
 
RECREATIONS OF THE RED 
 LETTER CLUB. 
 
AD IULUM ANTONIUM. 
 
 Perchance on some Red Letter night, 
 When snow was softly heaping 
 
 Outside upon the window sill 
 And, o'er our senses creeping, 
 
 The sleepy malt, the grate-fire's glow, 
 That tinged our pipe-smoke rosy 
 
 As evening clouds, had made us feel 
 Particularly cozy ; 
 
 I've taken from my pocket's depths 
 A torn and crumpled paper, 
 
 Whereon were traced some idle 
 
 rhymes, 
 An idler brain's light vapor ; 
 
 And if to these the Letters Red 
 Listened with kind indulgence, 
 
 We'll lay it to that genial malt 
 And fire-light's soft effulgence. 
 
 168 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY WATSON.] 
 OMPLAINT is some- 
 
 times made that in the 
 teaching given at Yale 
 the aesthetic side of studies is 
 neglected : e. g., that in the 
 reading of Greek and Latin 
 texts, the structure of the lan- 
 guage is attended to and the 
 thoughts of the authors disre- 
 garded. The complaint seems 
 to me partly just, and in this 
 article I will sketch out a plan 
 by which the study of algebra, 
 for example, might be made not 
 only to sharpen the reason, but 
 to train the critical faculties 
 169 
 
I7<> ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 and elevate the human soul. 
 Professor Packard once told his 
 class that the curriculum had 
 made no provision for the cul- 
 ture of the imagination. How 
 much might be done in that 
 way, even in pure mathematics, 
 by a proper mode of treatment 
 will be seen perhaps from the 
 following outlines of a course. 
 
 A late ingenious writer has 
 tried to show that the false 
 science of alchemy was only a 
 covert way of expressing, by 
 means of a symbolism, truths 
 in moral and political philos- 
 ophy which it would have been 
 unsafe in the Middle Ages to 
 maintain openly. An analyti- 
 cal study of algebra will develop 
 the fact that, .underlying its 
 artificial symbolism, its alpha- 
 betical triflings, its obscure, and, 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 171 
 
 to many, meaningless formulae, 
 there lies a life-drama of dark 
 and stormy passions a tale of 
 fate, of crime, of temptation 
 and fall. It will be remem- 
 bered that the science is of 
 Oriental, of Arabian origin. 
 The Oriental mind takes pleas- 
 ure in mystic and figurative 
 methods of expression, and it 
 may well be that this method 
 has been taken of preserving, 
 under the forms of a language 
 whose true import is revealed 
 to a few choice spirits in every 
 age, one of that body of legends 
 almost coeval with the race 
 the folk-lore of the East. It is 
 a tale of the triumph of the 
 strong over the weak ; the evil 
 over the good; the tempter 
 over the tempted ; the Mephis- 
 topheles over the Faust. 
 
172 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 It will be seen that among 
 the various writers who have 
 treated the subject, under some 
 minor differences of style and 
 statement, there is a general 
 agreement as to the relative 
 position of the two central per- 
 sonages of the drama the char- 
 acters of A and B. What this 
 relation exactly is, it is impos- 
 sible to say. It is usually indi- 
 cated numerically. Sometimes 
 it is expressed in terms of the 
 mysterious and unknown quan- 
 tity x, which the reader is al- 
 ways requested to find, but 
 which, if found at all (which is 
 rarely the case), resolves itself 
 into some number as baffling 
 to the curiosity as the number 
 of the Beast in Revelation. 
 What light does it shed on x 
 to discover that x\\, or that 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGE&RA. 173 
 
 ^ r=:/ V/2na? Then too x is usu- 
 ally variable, sometimes infi- 
 nite, not seldom imaginary or 
 absurd. It has indeed been 
 directly asserted that the rela- 
 tion of A to B was as / to /'. 
 but what was p? what was f'f 
 The clew to this cipher is cer- 
 tainly far from ascertained. 
 
 For these reasons it is advis- 
 able in the aesthetic study of 
 algebra to neglect the long 
 pages of statistics or figurative 
 matter which form the bulk of 
 most treatises. They shed no 
 light on our researches. It is 
 only in the problems, or what 
 may be called the letter-press 
 . of the work, that we find any 
 consistent and rational state- 
 ments about A and B. Even 
 here the cautious and singularly 
 non-committal manner of the 
 
174 ANALYTICAL ALGE3RA. 
 
 historian leaves much untold. 
 Algebra may be called like 
 rhetoric "a science of hints 
 and suggestions" or better, a 
 science of puzzles and riddles. 
 The sphinxy chronicler makes 
 a guarded statement, and then 
 suddenly asks a question which 
 often seems to have no connec- 
 tion at all with the previous 
 statement. Almost every sen- 
 tence ends with an interroga- 
 tion point. 
 
 From these materials, how- 
 ever, meager as they are, the 
 following general results may 
 be gained as to the character 
 and relations of A and B. B is 
 the~ hero of the drama. He 
 seems to be a man of fine feel- 
 ings, of a generous and social, 
 open and confiding nature, but 
 of a weak will and easily influ- 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 175 
 
 enced. We find him with a 
 kind of humorous benevolence 
 repeatedly distributing coppers 
 in geometrical progression to 
 the poor. He seems to be the 
 careless and good-humored gen- 
 tleman referred to by Mr. Tod- 
 hunter on page 208 of his Alge- 
 bra. " A gentleman sends a lad 
 into the market to buy a shil- 
 ling's worth of oranges. The 
 lad having eaten a couple, the 
 gentleman pays at the rate of 
 a penny for fifteen more than 
 the market price/' etc. His 
 easy credulity and recklessness 
 seem to have led him into ex- 
 travagance and folly. We find 
 him speculating in city real es- 
 tate, investing x dollars in rect- 
 angular lots containing m 
 square feet. He seems to have 
 fallen in with the sporting ring 
 
176 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 and to have run around islands 
 on a wager always losing; to 
 have invested in lotteries 
 always drawing blanks: the 
 chances of his drawing a prize 
 being usually represented as 
 n:m no doubt ridiculously 
 small. 
 
 On the other hand A, the 
 lago, the Mephistopheles, the 
 devil of the plot, is painted as 
 a man of a secret, reserved 
 and tortuous mind. Contrast 
 the open-hearted, unsuspecting 
 frankness of B with the shuf- 
 fling evasions of A's answers to 
 the simplest question. Thus 
 A being asked by B how old 
 he is, replies "m times the cube 
 of C's age =~i of the square 
 root of my own." Whenever 
 A and B are brought into con- 
 tact, the former is represented 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 177 
 
 as the superior in mental and 
 bodily strength. In those nu- 
 merous and mysterious trips 
 which they are perpetually tak- 
 ing between two places distant 
 x miles from each other, A 
 always accomplishes the jour- 
 ney in one m ih of the time that 
 B does. A always performs 
 with ease in the incredibly 
 short period of n days that 
 piece of work which the indo- 
 lent B requires fully m days to 
 complete. At an early period 
 in their history, A seems to 
 have laid B under some dread- 
 ful obligation, or to have dis- 
 covered some terrible secret 
 which places the latter wholly 
 in his power. The power thus 
 obtained he uses with remorse- 
 less cruelty. He persuades B 
 to invest his money in partner- 
 
178 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 ships where B contributes m 
 dollars to A's n. He extorts 
 hush money from him in sums 
 of 500, 1000, nay, even y dol- 
 lars! With a fiendish humor, 
 he pretends to regard these 
 installments of blackmail as 
 loans loans of pure accommo- 
 dation for / months and at r 
 per cent, interest of course 
 never paid. 
 
 What the secret of this in- 
 fluence was we cannot say. 
 Was there a woman in the 
 case? There is something in 
 the character of C a personage 
 occasionally introduced which 
 leads to the suspicion that she 
 was a woman. Thus, on page 
 474 of Todhunter we are told, 
 4 'It is 3 to i that A speaks 
 truth, 6 to i that B does, and 
 I to 3 that C does. What is 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 179 
 
 the probability that an event 
 took place which A asserts to 
 have happened, and which B 
 and C deny?" Three conclu- 
 sions seem to be justified by 
 this statement : 
 
 1. The remarkable natural 
 deceitfulness of C points not 
 doubtfully to her sex. 
 
 2. B appears by this time to 
 have become involved in a train 
 of prevarications made neces- 
 sary perhaps by his attempts to 
 conceal the secret referred to, 
 and to have lost a portion of 
 his natural truthfulness. 
 
 41 Oh, what a tangled web we weave 
 When first we practice to deceive ! " 
 
 But even so, his word is more 
 to be trusted than the organic 
 cfuplicity of A. 
 
 3. The above problem seems 
 
180 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 to have presented itself to the 
 mind of B while endeavoring to 
 free himself from the toils of 
 A. He reflects whether his 
 own word, coupled with that of 
 C, may outweigh (possibly in a 
 court of justice) the unsup- 
 ported testimony of A. He is 
 tempted to cast off his thrall- 
 dom and boldly deny the 
 "event" obscurely alluded to, 
 which can be no other than the 
 terrible, possibly guilty secret 
 which A uses to his destruction. 
 If any such plan of relief pre- 
 sents itself to his mind, he is too 
 weak to carry it out. He falls 
 more and more hopelessly into 
 the toils, and struggles less and 
 less. The malign influence of 
 A becomes stronger as the 
 drama sweeps to its catas- 
 trophe. B invests with increas- 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. l8l 
 
 ing recklessness in the lots and 
 lotteries. He probably also 
 takes to drink, for we read of 
 "hogsheads, one of wine and 
 one of beer, with cubical con- 
 tents as m, n, and exhausted 
 respectively at the rate of x and 
 y quarts per diem." 
 
 Toward the close of his mel- 
 ancholy career, A gets him into 
 gambling. It is needless to say 
 that he is no match for the lat- 
 'ter. The chapter on " prob- 
 ability" is nothing more or less 
 than an account of his losses at 
 cards and dice to this Hon. 
 Deuceace. Thus on page 468, 
 problem 27, "two persons, A 
 and B, engage in a game in 
 which A's skill is to B's as 3 to 
 2. Find the chance of A's 
 winning at least 3 games out of 
 5." Sometimes there seems to 
 
1 82 ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 
 
 be a pool in which several en- 
 gage possibly one D, a char- 
 acter who appears but seldom, 
 and seems to be a tool of A's, 
 was present among others. On 
 page 470 we have a description 
 of one of these friendly games. 
 "In a bag are n balls of m 
 colors, / being of the first color, 
 p* of the second color . . . pm 
 of the m th color. If the balls DC 
 drawn out one by one, what is 
 the chance that all the balls of 
 the first color will be drawn, etc ?" 
 The catastrophe of the drama 
 is shrouded in impenetrable 
 night. What was the fate of A, 
 of B, of C, of all the rest of the 
 alphabet, including old Izzard, 
 "that gray-haired man of glee?" 
 I cannot say : but enough has 
 been done toward resolving the 
 enigma to show how much 
 
ANALYTICAL ALGEBRA. 183 
 
 would be accomplished by a 
 critical study of algebra in its 
 aesthetic relations, disregarding 
 those tables of meaningless 
 signs and formulae which are 
 made the sole object of study 
 under the present false, disci- 
 plinary system. 
 
 "The limits of this introduc- 
 tion, " as Mr. Buckle would say, 
 forbid me to do more than indi- 
 cate how valuable the same 
 method of treatment would be 
 if employed, for instance, on 
 "Arnold's Latin Prose Compo- 
 sition." Balbus, Caius, and 
 even Titus Manlius, the nobilis- 
 simus Juvenis, would be no 
 longer mere pegs to hang in- 
 struction upon, but living, 
 breathing souls like the gener- 
 ous, the gentle, but alas! the 
 unhappy and fallen B. 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY HUDSON.] 
 
 HE rummager among 
 top shelves of old libra- 
 ries unearths a set of 
 curious fossils belonging to the 
 literary deposits of the earlier 
 half of this century. These are 
 the Annuals, octavos with gilt- 
 edged leaves, and bindings 
 embossed with leaf-and-flower 
 patterns. Their backs are 
 stamped with such titles as the 
 following: " The Gem," "The 
 Token," " The Wreath," " The 
 Casket," "Friendship's Offer- 
 ing," "The Rose of Sharon." 
 Open them ; what do you find ? 
 184 
 
44 OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 185 
 
 A frontispiece copperplate 
 with a veil of tissue paper, be- 
 hind which languishes " Julia," 
 or simpers " The Nun/' A 
 vignette title vase of roses and 
 convolvuluses ; other engrav- 
 ings " The Sisters "; " Scene 
 on the Hudson "; " The Decla- 
 ration " (village maid at cottage 
 door ; latticed windows ; spin- 
 ning-wheel ; wicker bird-cage ; 
 woodbine ; distant spire ; lover 
 in Highland costume). 
 
 Then for contents there is an 
 ode by Mrs. Sigourney, per- 
 haps " To a Shred of Linen " : 
 
 " O shred." 
 
 There is a sonnet by Park 
 Benjamin ; a sacred poem by 
 N. P. Willis. There are other 
 poems " Joan of Arc"; "Jeph- 
 tha's Daughter "; many " Stan- 
 
186 OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 zas " and " Lines," " Vents to 
 the Heart," or " Leaves from 
 the Volume of Life," all written 
 with much pomp of blank verse 
 and exclamation point by Ag- 
 nes Strickland, Miss Edgarton, 
 Miss Dodd, and other Misses 
 and Mrses. " nameless here for- 
 evermore." They start out 
 with great energy of invocation, 
 as 
 
 " Ay, lady ! braid thy jeweled hair, 
 And dight thee in thy rich array ! " 
 
 or of aspiration, as 
 
 " Oh, for the pomp of waters ! for 
 
 the roar 
 Of waves infuriate ! " 
 
 Then, for prose, there are ro- 
 mantic tales : " The Brigand's 
 Daughter "; " The Faithful 
 Page "; " The Bramin's Well "; 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 187 
 
 " The Astrologer "; opening, 
 it may be, with some such pas- 
 sage as this : " It was a large 
 and lofty apartment in the 
 tower of an ancient castle, 
 where the pale astrologer sat 
 among his astral instruments 
 and his heavy tomes alone." 
 Tome, by the way, is " nuts " to 
 the Annual writers ; no astrolo- 
 ger's library should be without 
 one, and even an alchemist 
 should have a few tomes lying 
 around among his retorts and 
 crucibles. The tome is to the 
 mere book as the " shallop " or 
 " pinnace " is to the prosaic 
 rowboat. I should like to see 
 a shallop, I have read of so 
 many. 
 
 Besides the tales, there are 
 moral and instructive pieces, 
 such as " Human Life," or 
 
188 "OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 " Copernicus." Also, short 
 rhapsodies in prose, as thus : 
 
 " NIGHT. 
 "Bv HENRY C. LEONARD. 
 
 " The sun hath set, and Night comes 
 with her silent step. I behold her sable 
 curtains falling and darkening the 
 
 and so on for a page. 
 
 In the preface the modest 
 editor says : " It is hardly be- 
 coming in us to allude individu- 
 ally to the contents of this vol- 
 ume. We believe none is with- 
 out its value. Yet it is difficult 
 to refrain from inviting the 
 attention of the younger por- 
 tion of our female readers to 
 the character of ' Emma/ so 
 beautifully and truthfully por- 
 trayed by the pen of one who 
 
'OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 189 
 
 had frequent access to the inner 
 sanctuary of her being." 
 
 Dear old silly Annuals ! I 
 like their naive sentimentality, 
 their majestic emptiness, their 
 skin-deep Byronism, their feeble 
 echoes of the mediaevalism of 
 Walter Scott, here in Yankee 
 Land, where the well sweep 
 and the chip pile in the back 
 yard had not yet elbowed the 
 ivy-mantled tower out of liter- 
 ature. 
 
 It amuses this generation to 
 think that the Annuals were 
 written and read by grown up 
 men and women. The Ameri- 
 can mind, shrewd enough on 
 the practical side, was, indeed, 
 in the callow stage in the item 
 of taste. Nevertheless, the 
 humble Annuals are a part of 
 our literary history. They led 
 
IQO "OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 a center table existence in 
 times when the effusions of 
 " L. E. L." were copied widely 
 into young ladies' albums, and 
 " More Droppings from the 
 Pen that wrote Proverbial 
 Philosophy," continued to drib- 
 ble on the still unworn stone of 
 popular endurance. The in- 
 frequent piano was small but 
 upright (that poor creature, 
 Melodeon, was not, as yet), and 
 it resounded alternately to the 
 songs of Morris and of Moore ; 
 to " Near the Lake where 
 Droops the Willow," and to 
 "The Harp that Once thro' 
 Tara's Halls." The senti- 
 ments of the former bard were 
 reflected weekly in the New 
 Mirror, side by side with the 
 sprightlier fancies of Willis. As 
 for the young gentleman con- 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." IQI 
 
 tributors to "The Keepsake" or 
 " The Nosegay," we have seen 
 in Dickinson's ivory miniatures 
 their silk stocks, high-shoul- 
 dered dress coats, marvelously 
 rosy cheeks, impossible blue 
 eyes, brown hair, and sweet 
 smiles. They gave moonlight 
 serenades on the guitar. The 
 lady contributors wore " mits" 
 on their hands and carried 
 lockets. They affected brioches 
 and divans ; had not Zuleika a 
 divan to recline on, in her bou- 
 doir at Stamboul? To this 
 period belongs Dr. Holmes's 
 
 ' ' Village maid 
 Who worketh woe in satin, 
 The graves in green, the grass in black, 
 The epitaph in Latin." 
 
 This was before Mr. Ruskin 
 had taught her better. 
 
 I have introduced this men- 
 
IQ2 " OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 tion of the Annuals because they 
 furnish a convenient term to 
 criticism. One of them " The 
 Gem," Philadelphia, 1842, is 
 on my bookshelves, and Demp- 
 ster in referring to some verses 
 or other in the magazines (pos- 
 sibly by Dr. Parsons), will often 
 describe them as " gemmy " 
 a word that connotes much and 
 merits a wider currency. To 
 one that knows the Annuals, 
 for instance, it might be a suffi- 
 cient criticism of Percival, to 
 say that he is gemmy. Label 
 his poems, " Percivalia : Conn. 
 River Valley ; Gemmiferous 
 Period " ; and let the curator of 
 our literary Peabody put them 
 away in the appropriate pigeon 
 hole. There, at any rate, they 
 repose, with or without label, 
 in that readerless limbo of 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." IQ3 
 
 " The Poets of America " 
 haunted by the respectable 
 shade of Mrs. Sigourney. To 
 live an immortality in elegant 
 extracts is even a more unsub- 
 stantial existence than to " sub- 
 sist in bones and be but pyra- 
 midally extant." When they 
 gild your covers, prepare your 
 contents for oblivion. 
 
 It is not a grateful task to 
 raise the ghost of a dead repu- 
 tation for the purpose of kick- 
 ing it. But in Percivars case it 
 would be more fair to say that 
 his reputation has outlived his 
 readers. This must be Pro- 
 fessor Lowell's excuse for put- 
 ting a quietus to him. Lowell's 
 estimate of him seems to me 
 entirely just, and I revive the 
 topic not in order to differ with 
 the critic, but because the lat- 
 
194 " OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 ter's essay (published in " My 
 Study Windows ") has pro- 
 voked much hostile remark in 
 print and out. This was to be 
 expected, as the critic was a 
 Harvard man and the criticised 
 a Yale man. Yale men natu- 
 rally cherished a regard for Per- 
 cival's memory, though they 
 may not have taken the trouble 
 to read his verses, and many of 
 them said in their hearts : " We 
 acknowledge that our college 
 has not raised a large crop of 
 rhymers. Her sons have been 
 busy with sterner stuff. Our 
 Quinnipiac runs through pleas- 
 anter scenery than their Charles, 
 yet no one has told how it 
 crooks its * steel-blue sickle ' 
 among the meadows. Our boys 
 died as bravely for their country 
 as theirs, but our knightly sol- 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." IQ5 
 
 diers still await their poet, and 
 meanwhile catch but a reflected 
 ray ' on their white shields of 
 expectation/ But even when 
 our Helicon was at its dryest, 
 we consoled ourselves with one 
 name. Was there not our own 
 Percival ? At Cambridge no 
 occasion lacks its poet. The 
 class of '29 has a little reunion ; 
 straightway some verses in the 
 Atlantic. Emerson addresses 
 the Phi Beta Kappa : an ode. 
 Josiah Quincy reaches his I35th 
 birthday ; more odes. The air 
 is thick with shuttlecocks of 
 praise, flying from battledore 
 to battledore. Not that we 
 would pull a feather from a 
 single shuttlecock ; but why 
 could they not leave us our one 
 little ewe lamb they of the 
 abundant mutton?" 
 
196 " OUR OWN PERCIVAL:' 
 
 Since reading the essay in 
 question I have been through 
 Percival " Prometheus " and 
 all equipped with a sharpened 
 pencil for the marking of fine 
 passages, and must confess that 
 my marginalia are scanty. His 
 poetry is hectic from first to 
 last. If you want a bit of 
 second-hand Byronism, read 
 " The Suicide." The lines 
 which Lowell quotes from " An 
 Imprecation " can be matched 
 with the concluding stanza of 
 the former piece, directed 
 against a worthy Congrega- 
 tional minister who forbade 
 the poet's addresses to his 
 daughter : 
 
 "And thou, arch-moral-murderer! hear 
 
 my curse : 
 
 Go gorge and wallow in thy priestly 
 sty! 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." IQ7 
 
 Than what thou art I cannot wish thee 
 
 worse : 
 Then with thy kindred reptiles,* crawl 
 
 and die." 
 
 Lowell has thoroughly dis- 
 posed of Percival's claims as a 
 lyrical and didactic poet. But 
 the thing which has struck me 
 as especially strange, in reading 
 his verses, is his failure to make 
 his scholarship and his knowl- 
 edge of nature, which were con- 
 fessedly great, contribute of 
 their substance to his descrip- 
 tive poetry. The two lobes of 
 his brain the scientific lobe 
 and the poetic lobe appear to 
 have worked independently. 
 His geological reports are the 
 dryest of statistics, and his verse 
 is remarkably unsubstantial and 
 unballasted by facts, allusions, 
 
 * Other Congregational ministers ? 
 
IQ 8 "OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 and concrete images. In tak- 
 ing up the study of botany, 
 geology, and chemistry, it 
 might seem as if he felt the 
 need, as a poet, of putting some 
 healthy, natural ground under 
 his unsteady muse, just as bird- 
 fanciers put bits of turf in their 
 cages for the larks to stand on 
 when they sing. But his poetry 
 remained to the end as subject- 
 ive as ever, and his nature is 
 as gemmy as anything in the 
 Annuals. What have we to do 
 in Connecticut with groves, 
 founts, cots, ruins, leas, shep- 
 herds, zephyrs, bowers, nightin- 
 gales, myrtles, jessamines, lat- 
 tices, etc? He found them in 
 ]VLoore and not in New Haven. 
 We have few " groves " in this 
 part of the world, except the 
 haunts of German picknickers. 
 
"OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 199 
 
 Instead,^ we have the native 
 article woods : oak, chestnut, 
 hickory, birch, growing close, 
 with spindling trunks and 
 branching tops ; lower down, 
 dogwood, laurel thickets and 
 white birch brush ; lower still, an 
 undergrowth of juniper, ground 
 pine, and the round-leaved 
 smilax. The next time that 
 I go to the woods behind 
 Donald Mitchell's I will look 
 for some " groves," and if I 
 find one, say of century oaks 
 the trees arranged in vistas, 
 twelve feet apart ; their giant 
 boles springing from nice, 
 smooth turf ; and deer troop- 
 ing down the perspective ; and 
 if, in a glade of this same grove, 
 I come across a ruined abbey 
 mantled with real English ivy 
 (which has such work to " man- 
 
200 "OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 tie " the north wall of the col- 
 lege library), then I will ac- 
 knowledge that Percival was 
 a great poet and saw the world 
 with his own eyes. 
 
 If there is little truth in his 
 descriptive poetry, still less is 
 there any of that higher, imagi- 
 native handling of nature in 
 which the thing seen is chiefly 
 beautiful because of the thing 
 suggested. There is no such 
 analogy in all his verses as in 
 that fancy of Lowell's own, 
 where he speaks of the waves 
 out at sea as appearing to 
 " climb smooth sky-beaches far 
 and sweet." 
 
 It is fair to say that a few of 
 Percival's pieces are exceptions 
 to these remarks. " The Coral 
 Grove " and " Seneca Lake " 
 have deservedly obtained a wide 
 
" OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 2OI 
 
 circulation in school readers 
 and books of selections. Low- 
 ell's saying, that Percival never 
 wrote a rememberable verse, is 
 not quite true. The line, 
 
 " There is a sweetness in woman's decay," 
 
 is a familiar quotation, though 
 the sentiment is characteris- 
 tically sickly. It may be, too, 
 from some association rather 
 than from any rememberable 
 quality in the verse, but the 
 sight of one of the Litchfield 
 lakes at early morning, or of 
 some copy of Landseer's 
 " Sanctuary/' will invariably 
 recall to me the stanza, 
 
 " On thy fair bosom, silver lake, 
 
 The wild swan spreads his snowy sail, 
 And round his breast the ripples break 
 As down he bears before the gale." 
 
 For the rest, Percival's 
 
202 "OUR OWN PERCIVAL." 
 
 scholarship was unquestioned. 
 His life, though in some things 
 weak, was free and proud and 
 a protest against Philistinism. 
 New Haveners would not like 
 to lose his picturesque figure 
 from their traditions. Of this, 
 tall and stooping, and wrapped 
 in an " old blue cloak," the 
 eye of fancy may still catch 
 glimpses, passing swiftly and 
 furtively between the college 
 buildings in the dusk. 
 
BIFTEK AUX CHAMPIGNONS. 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY PUNDERSON.] 
 
 j]IMI, do you remember 
 Don't get behind your fan- 
 That morning in September 
 On the cliffs of Grand Manan ; 
 Where to the shock of Fundy 
 
 The topmost harebells sway, 
 (Campanula rotundi- 
 folia : cf. Gray) ? 
 
 On the pastures high and level, 
 
 That overlook the sea, 
 Where I wondered what the devil 
 
 Those little things could be 
 That Mimi stooped to gather, 
 
 As she strolled across the down, 
 And held her dress skirt rather 
 
 Oh, now, you needn't frown. 
 203 
 
204 BIFTEK A UX CHAMPIGNONS. 
 
 For you know the dew was heavy, 
 And your boots, / know, were thin : 
 
 So a little extra brevi- 
 ty in skirts was, sure, no sin. 
 
 Besides, who minds a cousin ? 
 First, second, even third 
 
 I've kissed 'em by the dozen, 
 And they never once demurred. 
 
 " If one's allowed to ask it," 
 
 Quoth I, " ma belle cousine, 
 What have you in your basket?" 
 
 (Those baskets white and green 
 The brave Passamaquoddies 
 
 Weave out of scented grass, 
 And sell to tourist bodies 
 
 Who through Mt. Desert pass). 
 
 You answered, slightly frowning, 
 
 " Put down your stupid book 
 That everlasting Browning ! 
 
 And come and help me look. 
 Mushroom you spik him English, 
 
 I call him champignon : 
 I'll teach you to distinguish 
 
 The right kind from the wrong." 
 
BIFTEK A UX CHAMPIGNONS. 205 
 
 There was no fog on Fundy 
 
 That blue September day ; 
 The west wind, for that one day, 
 
 Had swept it all away. 
 The lighthouse glasses twinkled, 
 
 The white gulls screamed and flew, 
 The merry sheep bells tinkled, 
 
 The merry breezes blew. 
 
 The bayberry aromatic, 
 
 The papery immortelles 
 (That give our grandma's attic 
 
 That sentimental smell, 
 Tied up in little brush-brooms) 
 
 Were sweet as new-mown hay, 
 While we went hunting mushrooms 
 
 That blue September day. 
 
 In each small juicy dimple 
 
 Where turf grew short and thick, 
 And nibbling teeth of simple 
 
 Sheep had browsed it to the quick ; 
 Where roots or bits of rotten 
 
 Wood were strewed, we found a 
 
 few 
 Young buttons just begotten 
 
 Of morning sun and dew. 
 
206 BIFTEK A UX CHAMPIGNONS. 
 
 And you compared the shiny, 
 
 Soft, creamy skin, that hid 
 The gills so pink and tiny, 
 
 To your gloves of undressed kid, 
 While I averred the color 
 
 Of the gills, within their sheath, 
 Was like but only duller 
 
 The rosy palms beneath. 
 
 As thus we wandered, sporting 
 
 In idleness of mind, 
 There came a fearful snorting 
 
 And trampling close behind ; 
 And, with a sudden plunge, I 
 
 Upset the basketful 
 Of those accursed fungi, 
 
 As you shrieked, " The bull ! The 
 bull ! " 
 
 And then we clung together 
 
 And faced the enemy, 
 Which proved to be a wether 
 
 And scared much worse than we. 
 But while that startled mutton 
 
 Went scampering away, 
 The mushrooms every button 
 
 Had tumbled in the bay. 
 
BIFTEK A UX CHAMPIGNONS. 2O7 
 
 The basket had a cover, 
 
 The wind was blowing stiff, 
 And rolled that basket over 
 
 The edges of the cliff. 
 It bounced from crag to bowlder ; 
 
 It leaped and whirled in air, 
 But while you clutched my shoulder 
 
 I did not greatly care. 
 
 I tried to look as rueful 
 
 As though each mushroom there 
 Had been a priceless truffle, 
 
 But yet I did not care. 
 And ever since that Sunday 
 
 On the cliffs of Grandma Nan, 
 High over the surf of Fundy, 
 
 I've used the kind they can. 
 
WHAT'S IN A NAME? 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY DEMPSTER.] 
 
 HE legislature passed a law, 
 Arkan'sas should be Ar'kan- 
 
 'Tis well ; and if I had my way, 
 
 lo'wa should be I'oway. 
 
 To men who deal in real estate 
 
 The difference may not seem so great 
 
 'Twixt ante and penultimate 
 
 'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee ; 
 
 But they who deal in poesie 
 
 Are fain to make their boatman row 
 
 Euphonious " down the O'hio." 
 
 The name R. Kansas doth provoke 
 
 A cacographic A. Ward joke. 
 
 lo'ive a, too ! The sound begets 
 
 Abortive puns on bonded debts. 
 
 lo'wa's not a state of grace : 
 
 I wouldn't live in such a place. 
 
 But, though they're rather far away, 
 
 I think I'd like to go and stay 
 
 In Ar'kansaw or I'oway. 
 
THE SPRINGALD AND THE 
 CAUDA GALLI. 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY PUNDERSON.] 
 
 JjOOK here, look here, bold 
 
 bar-keepere, 
 
 Come mingle a cup for me ; 
 And mingle it quick, and mingle it 
 
 thick, 
 And thou's' earn a broad penny." 
 
 " O give it a name, thou fair sprin- 
 
 gald; 
 
 Shall it be of the foaming bock, 
 Or the whisky skin, or the John 
 
 Collins, 
 Or the tail of the gallant cock ? " 
 
 " A cock-tail of the gin, the gin, 
 Ymeint both strong and sweet, 
 
 With a curly chip of lemon skin , 
 For such a guest were meet. 
 209 
 
210 THE SPRING ALD. 
 
 " My eyes are as holes in a blanket 
 burnt, 
 
 And my head as the head of three, 
 I have the jammer yclept of cat, 
 
 For I've been on a sheol of a spree. 
 
 "A wet night maketh a dry morning, 
 Quoth Hendyng, ' rede ye right ; 
 
 And the cure most fair is the self-same 
 
 hair 
 Of the dog that gave the bite. ' 
 
 " So whether it be of fingers three, 
 
 Or else of fingers two, 
 I want it strong and I want it long, 
 
 And I want it p. d. q." 
 
 Then up and spake a little foot page 
 That stood by the barroom door, 
 
 Said " here is a wight would speak 
 
 with thee 
 A minute, but and no more." 
 
 Said " O he beareth a broad letter, 
 He hath ridden both fierce and far, 
 
 May'st hear the tramp of his red roan 
 
 steeds 
 In the Madison Avenue car." 
 
THE SPRING A LD. 211 
 
 He hath taken a quill of the gray goose 
 wing 
 
 And dipped it in the ink, 
 And written upon a fair paper 
 
 " I have spit within this drink." 
 
 He hath laid the paper upon the cup, 
 And the cup upon the bar, 
 
 And stepped outside to speak with the 
 
 wight, 
 Had ridden both fierce and far. 
 
 He hath broken the seal of the broad 
 
 letter 
 
 And written a fair answere, 
 He hath given a fee of the white 
 
 money 
 To that district messengere. 
 
 He hath hied him back to the bar 
 again, 
 
 And taken his cock-tail up ; 
 He hath cast one look at the fair paper 
 
 That lay on the top of the cup. 
 
 " God save thee, gentle springald, 
 From the fiends that plague thy 
 soul! 
 
212 THE SPRING A LD. 
 
 Hast got 'em again, or wherefore then 
 Doth thine eye so wildly roll ? 
 
 " God save thee, gentle springald, 
 From the fiends that haunt thee 
 thus! 
 
 Why dost thou tear thy yellow hair ? 
 And eke why dost thou cuss ? " 
 
 " O barkeepere, some felon here 
 Hath wrought foul shame and sin. 
 
 Give back, give back my broad penny 
 Or mix me another gin ; 
 
 For a second line stands under mine 
 ' Eke I have spit therein.' " 
 
AMOURS PASSAGERS. 
 
 [The papers read at the club were gener- 
 ally of a humorous rather than sentimental 
 intention, but Dempster sometimes wrote 
 of his long vacation experiences 
 " As though in Cupid's college he had 
 
 spent 
 Sweet days, a lovely graduate, still un- 
 
 shent, 
 And kept his rosy terms in idle languish- 
 
 ment." 
 
 Doubts were expressed as to whether 
 these passionate utterances were war- 
 ranted by the facts, but the following 
 verses of Dempster's are submitted with- 
 out comment.] 
 
 1IGHT loves and soon for- 
 gotten hates, 
 
 Heat-lightnings of the brood- 
 ing summer sky 
 Ye too bred of the summer's heat, 
 Ye too, like summer, fleet 
 Ye have gone by. 
 
 213 
 
214 AMOURS PASSAGERS. 
 
 Walks in the woods and whispers 
 
 over gates, 
 
 Gay rivalries of tennis and croquet 
 Gone with the summer sweet, 
 Gone with the swallow fleet 
 Southward away ! 
 
 Breath of the rose, laughter of maids 
 
 Kissed into silence by the setting 
 moon ; 
 
 Wind of the morn that wakes and 
 blows, 
 
 And hastening night that goes 
 
 Too soon too soon ! 
 
 Meetings and partings, tokens, sere- 
 nades, 
 
 Tears idle tears and coy denials 
 vain ; 
 
 Flower of the summer's rose, 
 
 Say, will your leaves unclose 
 
 Ever again ? 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF A SUB- 
 FRESHMAN. 
 
 [CONTRIBUTED BY HIGGINSON.] 
 
 [|EN of imaginative minds 
 have often given great 
 weight to the thoughts 
 and fancies of childhood. 
 Goethe insisted that the pup- 
 pet play described in " Wil- 
 helm Meister" had a real im- 
 portance in the history of his 
 development. Wordsworth 
 
 thought so seriously of a child's 
 early impressions of the world 
 that in his " Ode on the Inti- 
 mations of Immortality " he 
 seems to have adopted, almost 
 in earnest, the Platonic doctrine 
 of Reminiscence. And indeed 
 215 
 
2 1 6 SUB-FRESHMA N^S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 -those first pictures which the 
 universe paints on the sensitive 
 retina do have the air of belong- 
 ing to some past stage of exist- 
 ence. They lie in the memory 
 at an infinite remove, like the 
 miniature objects seen through 
 the wrong end of the telescope 
 small, distinct, and with a pris- 
 matic play of color about their 
 edges, as though the dew were 
 still on them and the light of 
 dawn. The mind soon learns 
 to expect no novelties. New 
 combinations there may be, but 
 the elements are old. But in 
 childhood, before the alphabet 
 of experience has been learned, 
 there are new letters to be 
 spelled sensations element- 
 ally new, such as one might 
 have in mature life if a fresh 
 sense were added. " Turn the 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 217 
 
 eyes upside down/' says Emer- 
 son, " by looking at the land- 
 scape through your legs, and 
 how agreeable is the picture, 
 though you have seen it any 
 time these twenty years ! " We 
 can play our imaginations this 
 pleasant trick no longer ; but, 
 as children, what a novel world 
 we secured by simply rolling 
 back the eyeballs, as we lay on 
 our backs, till the room stood 
 topsy-turvy ! A smooth white 
 floor was spread for the feet of 
 fancy to run upon without let 
 from wall to wall. The well- 
 known furniture hung head 
 downward, tables, chairs, pi- 
 ano, even the fire in the grate, 
 like a group of domestic stalac- 
 tites. The doors had thresh- 
 olds two feet high. All was so 
 old, yet so delightfully strange ! 
 
2 1 8 SUB-FRESHMA N^S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 A loss befalls us when our 
 scale of distances begins to 
 change. It is like an illusion 
 of the special sense which 
 happens to one sitting drowsily 
 by a window, who sees suddenly 
 a long way off a large bird fly- 
 ing swiftly along the horizon, 
 but, on shifting his position, 
 sees only an insect crawling on 
 the pane close to his eye. 
 Thus, the little lawn where I 
 used to play was an ampler 
 field for imagination to explore 
 than the widest landscape now- 
 adays. Seen from the study- 
 window of a moonlight Novem- 
 ber night, it had an unfamil- 
 iar, almost an unearthly, look. 
 Mysterious shadows haunted 
 its borders, and in the middle 
 plot, where the hoar-frost 
 spread a dim white drugget 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 2IQ 
 
 under the moon, I could uncer- 
 tainly make out the fairies' 
 ring circling about in the wind. 
 How different from that 
 " sunny spot of greenery " on 
 a May morning, when the 
 lilacs at the house corner were 
 in bloom and the syringa bushes 
 at the gate were full of bees ! 
 Then it was like a slope in 
 Arcadia, with gray-green tufts 
 here and there among the grass, 
 crowned with the blossom of a 
 self-sown daffodil. The bright 
 patch-work quilt lay on the 
 ground for the baby to play 
 on, and the nurse sat on the 
 terrace steps with her sewing, 
 while we wove the dandelion 
 chain. 
 
 The far corner of the lawn 
 was foreign country, and there 
 was an excitement in visiting 
 
220 SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 it. It was there that the water 
 stood longest after a rain, and 
 the turf was fine and mossy. 
 It was strewn with winged 
 maple-seeds and the chocolate- 
 brown pods of the honey locust. 
 These products and the trees 
 which shed them had some- 
 thing exotic about them when 
 compared with the more domes- 
 tic flora on the near side of the 
 lawn. We felt at home with 
 the snowberry bushes under 
 the study window, whose fruit 
 was our ammunition, and the 
 row of vergalieus whose little 
 yellow pears we found in Sep- 
 tember scattered about in the 
 long grass under the terrace- 
 bank, their skins speckled like 
 trout and broken into deep 
 cracks. The rough bark of the 
 pear trees also afforded coignes 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 221 
 
 of vantage for the locusts that 
 sang in the summer noons and 
 left their cast shells, sometimes 
 as many as a dozen on a single 
 trunk, of which we hoarded col- 
 lections in paper boxes. The 
 lawn was pleasantest at five 
 o'clock of a summer afternoon. 
 Then long shadows fell across 
 the grass, and we heard the 
 distant voices of the children 
 just let out of school, and knew 
 that presently the tea-bell 
 would ring and we should go 
 inside to bread-and-butter and 
 strawberries. - 
 
 The far corner under the 
 maples gained an added 
 mystery from its being the 
 scene of my initiation into the 
 game of " secrets." A little 
 girl among our playfellows 
 came to me one day, and, 
 
222 SUB-FRESHMAN^S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 whispering solemnly, " Never, 
 never tell ! " led me to a spot 
 marked by a flat stone. This 
 being raised disclosed a hollow 
 nest in the ground lined with 
 moss, in which were set, in a 
 kind of pattern, colored beads, 
 gilt buttons, bits of tin-foil and 
 sparkling glass, and other 
 glistening " nubbins." It was 
 as though the lid were lifted 
 from Golconda and the won- 
 ders of the subterranean world 
 revealed. 
 
 " Hush ! " she said, replac- 
 ing the stone : " it's our secret. 
 Nobody knows it but me and 
 you and Ella Burkett. It's 
 our secret us three." 
 
 No amount of stock in rail- 
 way or mining corporation 
 could give me now half the 
 sense of importance that I felt 
 
SU&-FRESHMA N^S IMPRESSIONS. 223 
 
 when admitted to a share in 
 that partnership. I wonder 
 whether this game was peculiar 
 to us, or whether other children 
 still play at " secrets " ? 
 
 The same little Alice who let 
 me into this first secret lived in 
 a house in our neighborhood, 
 where I sometimes went to 
 play, and which was to me as 
 a castle of romance by reason 
 of one architectural feature 
 in which it differed from the 
 abodes of prose. Common 
 dwellings had only two stair- 
 cases, one in the front hall and 
 one in the back entry for the 
 servants' use. But in that 
 enchanted mansion was a third 
 flight, ascending from a side- 
 entry to the upper story of a 
 wing. At the turning, half- 
 way up, was a stair broad 
 
224 SUB-FRESHMA N^S IMPRESSIONS 
 
 enough to make a little room 
 of itself, and over it a window 
 of yellow glass which shed a 
 strange fairy twilight through 
 the hall. The wing was little 
 used, and we were left to play 
 alone all day on the broad 
 stair, where we spread our toys 
 and spelled out our picture- 
 books. Outside the window a 
 large willow shook in the wind, 
 and the shadow of its branches 
 wavered in the solemn illumi- 
 nation that lay upon the floor, 
 Such tricks as memory plays 
 us ! In many an old cathedral 
 the dance of colors from the 
 great oriel, making patterns on 
 the pavement of the nave, has 
 brought suddenly before me 
 little Alice's face, and the dolls 
 and wooden elephant and 
 leaden soldiers, and the picture 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN^S IMPRESSIONS. 22$ 
 
 of " slovenly Peter," all trans- 
 figured in that mystic glory. 
 
 But, alas for young love, for 
 even thus early may love begin, 
 my sweet playmate was some- 
 thing of a sloven. Her Shaker 
 bonnet was always dangling 
 from the back of her neck. 
 Her brown hair was in a snarl. 
 Her stockings which were 
 none of the whitest were usu- 
 ally down about her ankles. 
 Her knuckles and even her dear 
 little knees were often grimy. 
 My nurse, a particular woman, 
 once said in my hearing that 
 Alice was a dirty girl. I had 
 never noticed this myself, but 
 I was now moved to a high 
 moral disgust, being at the 
 time aged six, and when Alice 
 next came to play with me I 
 said, " Alice Powers, you are a 
 
226 SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 dirty girl. Go home ! I won't 
 play with you." Poor Alice 
 looked at me with big eyes, and 
 then, bursting into tears and 
 flinging down an apron-full of 
 horse-chestnuts which she had 
 brought me for a present, went 
 slowly out of the yard. As I 
 watched her sobbing shoulders 
 disappear down the walk, my 
 heart misgave me. I felt that 
 Alice was nice, but public senti- 
 ment had pronounced her dirty. 
 Conscience, too, gave a twinge 
 as I picked up the horse-chest- 
 nuts her douceur. They were 
 new from the tree, shining and 
 darkly grained, like polished 
 mahogany, each with an eye of 
 floury white. A few days after, 
 my little playfellow was taken 
 with the croup and died. I 
 took the horse-chestnuts up 
 
SUB-FRESH MA N ' S IMPRESSIONS. 227 
 
 into the garret and, in a dark 
 corner behind the chimney, 
 cried over them all a rainy 
 afternoon in an agony of re- 
 morse experiencing, even at 
 that tender age the worst of all 
 mental sufferings, the memory 
 of ingratitude toward one who 
 has loved us and has gone for- 
 ever beyond the reach of our 
 atonement. 
 
 When the child grows old 
 enough to read, its imagination 
 has a wider reach, but becomes 
 less original. It reproduces its 
 favorite books in its sports. 
 From say nine to eleven the 
 minds of all the boys in our 
 neighborhood were under the 
 tyranny of " The Scalp- 
 hunters " and " The Last of the 
 Mohicans," and our chief out- 
 of-door pastime was to play 
 
228 SUB-FRESHMA N 'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 Indian. Assuming the names 
 of Chingachgook, Hawkeye, 
 Uncas, Seguin, St. Vrain, etc., 
 we ranged the vicinage in war 
 parties, emitting whoops, dart- 
 ing our wooden lances into the 
 quivering bodies of the ever- 
 greens, and laying ambushes 
 behind hedges. Our belts 
 bristled with bunches of grass, 
 the scalps of imaginary Min- 
 goes and Navajoes, mingled 
 together in cheerful defiance 
 of ethnology although the 
 lodge of a big sagamore in 
 the Algonkin tongues, who 
 could have taught us bet- 
 ter, lay right in our war path. 
 Sometimes we were treed by 
 peccaries in the big apple tree. 
 In the deep and parlous can- 
 yon behind the gooseberry 
 bushes we were attacked by 
 
SUB-FRESHMA N 'S IMPRESSIONS. 229 
 
 twenty-five grizzlies. We 
 scoured on fleet mustangs over 
 the broad prairies grazed by 
 Deacon Barlow's cow, slaying 
 buffaloes and Comanches. We 
 held the abandoned hen house 
 for a whole summer day 
 though sorely wounded 
 against a besieging party of 
 Apaches, who shot burning 
 arrows into the walls and tried 
 every other stratagem which 
 hellish cunning or the resources 
 of Captain Mayne Reid's im- 
 agination could invent. This 
 play was never popular with 
 the girls, who were forced to be 
 squaws and prepare our venison 
 in the wigwam the area of 
 the cellar door while we were 
 off on hunting or war parties. 
 Often, on returning at evening, 
 laden with spoils, we found 
 
230 SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 that the squaws had betaken 
 themselves to other games, and 
 we had to recall them to their 
 domestic duties. 
 
 Indoors, a favorite plaything 
 was the spool-basket, and the 
 favorite game that we played 
 with it was a kind of original 
 jack-straws. The basket being 
 inverted, about half a bushel of 
 brick-shaped blocks and spools 
 of all sizes and colors tumbled 
 gently into a heap. From this 
 mountain, resembling the lava- 
 pits of the Modocs, and repre- 
 senting chaos or the dawn of 
 history, the tribes of men were 
 slowly to extricate themselves. 
 The white spools were the Cau- 
 casian race, the red spools the 
 Indians, the yellow, the Mon- 
 gols, and the black, the Afri- 
 cans. Such of these as rolled 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 231 
 
 out upon the floor at the over- 
 turning of the basket, or could 
 be extricated from the heap 
 without displacing the blocks, 
 gathered into bands and fought 
 each other, or sailed away on 
 block rafts over the tranquil t 
 surface of the play-room carpet 
 to green isles under the table, 
 and edges of new-risen conti- 
 nents along the lounge, where 
 they founded colonies. Gradu- 
 ally those who lay deeper in 
 the mountain, overwhelmed 
 in a sort of Dantesque hell, 
 emerged through openings be- 
 tween the bowlders, and formed 
 the obstructions about them 
 into ramparts. Finally the 
 whole mass was reduced into 
 ordered lines of fortification, 
 the scattered bands united into 
 allied nations, and the whole 
 
232 SUB-FRESHMA N'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 ended in a Volksschlacht, where 
 the long cylinders of carpet- 
 thread spools served as cannon, 
 and the air was darkened by 
 shot and shell composed of the 
 little paper sewing-silk spools. 
 
 In days somewhat younger 
 than those, a main resource was 
 the kitchen, whose unrestrained 
 life contrasted gayly with the 
 stiff proprieties of the parlor. 
 Our kitchen had a stone step at 
 the threshold of the dining-room 
 door, where a cricket sometimes 
 sang, that dwelt in a neighbor- 
 ing cranny. Here I would sit 
 after supper, between the ser- 
 vants' table and the wooden 
 bench under which were ranged 
 my uncle's shoes twenty shoes 
 precisely alike, which he wore 
 in succession, beginning at one 
 end of the row and making a 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 233 
 
 complete revolution in ten days. 
 Over the bench hung his shoe- 
 horn on a nail, and over this 
 was a shelf with a lantern 
 and footstove. Beyond was 
 the cellar door, which, when 
 opened of a dark night, gave 
 admission to abysses of mys- 
 tery into which the imagina- 
 tion plunged with a pleasing 
 shudder. Here I would sit, I 
 say, and listen to the gabble of 
 the girls as they slowly stirred 
 their tea, absorbing it with loud 
 gulps and masticating their 
 buttered toast with a crunching 
 and chonking sound most fasci- 
 nating to the ear. The conver- 
 sation was usually discontinu- 
 ous, and abounded in rather 
 abrupt reflections, such as 
 " Tis three years, come Tues- 
 day week, since I left the old 
 
234 SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 country. Dear, dear ! Where'll 
 I be this day twelvemonth ? " 
 
 To this there would be no 
 reply, but the other would say 
 presently, gazing at the tea- 
 grounds in the bottom of her 
 empty cup, " What's my for- 
 tune?" 
 
 " I see an old man sitting in 
 a chair." 
 
 " No, but 'tis not, then ; 'tis 
 a big house on a hill that ye 
 see." 
 
 " Sure I've a purse in mine." 
 Etc., etc. 
 
 Often I besought them for 
 tales of Ireland, which I con- 
 ceived of from their report as a 
 wondrous green land of faery. 
 On Pancake Thursday, when 
 they baked a ring in a cake and 
 the kitchen was full of gossips 
 who came to the cutting, these 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 23$ 
 
 stories most abounded. There 
 seemed to be a definite reper- 
 tory of them, known by name 
 to the natives for they would 
 be called for under their titles, 
 like favorite songs at a glee as, 
 " Have ye ' The White Lady of 
 Blackrock Castle ' ? " or, " Have 
 e'er o' yez ' The Yellow Wa- 
 thers'?" 
 
 I can remember nothing of 
 them beyond the vague out- 
 lines of one, in which a girl 
 who is sitting in a tree at twi- 
 light hears her lover, under- 
 neath, plotting with another 
 man to take her life, and after- 
 ward, in a company where her 
 lover is present, says that she 
 has a riddle to tell : " I dreamed 
 a dream that the fox was dig- 
 ging a grave for me under the 
 tree in the woods. And I 
 
236 SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 dreamed that the fox fell into 
 the hole that he was digging." 
 The conclusion of the history 
 has gone from me. 
 
 I remember once being taken 
 into the fields to hunt for 
 shamrock by one of my nurses, 
 a fresh-faced young thing, just 
 over, whom we called Fat 
 Janey. It was on some saint's 
 day, or some Irish anniversary, 
 and there was some sentimental 
 or superstitious rite that she 
 wanted to perform with the 
 mystic trefoil. I have forgot- 
 ten the exact nature of it per- 
 haps putting it under her pil- 
 low to dream upon, as is done 
 with the wedding cake. At all 
 events, I remember that she 
 had to content herself with our 
 common clover ; and I recall 
 her voice distinctly as she went 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 237 
 
 searching through the fields 
 
 The long gray fields at night, 
 
 for it was toward evening 
 crooning one of those wild, 
 monotonous, tuneless chants 
 that the maids sing while hang- 
 ing out their clothes. Some of 
 the girls knew a few scraps of 
 Gaelic, and would teach me to 
 repeat them. I have forgotten 
 all but two sentences, which 
 sounded like " Conny sthon 
 thu," and "Tan da maw," 
 (The spelling is strictly pho- 
 netic, and I haven't the least 
 notion what the words mean.) 
 I now suspect that they occa- 
 sionally took advantage of my 
 innocence for they would 
 make me say over phrases 
 which they declared meant, 
 " How do ye do ? " or, " Give 
 
238 SUB-F&ESHMAN*S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 me a kiss/* and would laugh 
 immoderately when I repeated 
 them, and cry, " Listen to the 
 child ! " 
 
 A cook that we once had, 
 named Nora, possessed great 
 dramatic talent. She was a 
 large, handsome woman, from 
 the south of Ireland, with a 
 mass of blue-black hair. She 
 would let this down over her 
 shoulders, and, standing in the 
 middle of the kitchen, carving 
 knife in hand, roll her fine dark 
 eyes and recite the following 
 dialogue, taking both parts 
 alternately : 
 
 She. 
 Would ye not have a wife both fair and 
 
 young, 
 
 Could speak the French and the I-talian 
 tongue ? 
 
 He. 
 
 No. One language is enough for any 
 woman to speak ; 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 239 
 
 And before I'd be governed by such a 
 
 wife, 
 I'd take the sword and end me life. 
 
 [Stabs himself with carving knife, and 
 fall supine on kitchen floor. ~\ 
 She. 
 
 [Rising nimbly from floor, and stand- 
 ing over his imaginary bodyj\ 
 Alas ! alas ! Thin I fear 'tis true 
 So I'll take the sword and end me life 
 too. 
 
 [Stabs herself, and falls in like manner.] 
 
 She pronounced the w in 
 " sword " distinctly. 
 
 The servants* cousins or fol- 
 lowers were an unfailing spring 
 of fresh interest. From the 
 dining room I could hear a low 
 rumble of talk in the kitchen, 
 announcing the arrival of some 
 John or Patrick. On going out 
 there, I always found him sit- 
 ting uncomfortably straight on 
 one particular chair, under 
 which his hat was deposited, and 
 
240 SUB-FRESHMA N 'S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 dressed in black clothes, which 
 also suggested discomfort and 
 unwontedrtess. It was matter 
 of speculation with me why the 
 young and pretty girls had 
 hardly any followers, while 
 those who were uncommonly 
 old or ugly were wooed most 
 assiduously. Perhaps the old 
 ones had property. One lean 
 and tushy hag, named Cathe- 
 rine, who lived with us several 
 years, was very confidential 
 with me about her suitors. 
 She was torn between two. 
 The first was an absurdly young 
 fellow, with a fresh, pleasant 
 face. He was at least ten years 
 her junior, and courted her per- 
 severingly, but without much 
 encouragement. She spoke of 
 him as " the lad," and evidently 
 inclined toward his rival, a 
 
SUB-FRESHMA N '5 IMPRESSIONS. 24 1 
 
 steady man, with a red beard, 
 who weighed mentally about 
 a ton. She told me that this 
 latter one was rich, but that he 
 had no religion. " He is like a 
 baste of the field," she said. 
 Nothing but this lack of spirit- 
 uality seemed to make her hes- 
 itate between him and the other. 
 Another cook that we had, held 
 her head very high because she 
 might have married, had she 
 chosen, " a widow-man in the 
 old country, with a jaunting- 
 car." 
 
 The natural inclination of 
 children toward fetichism, or 
 the reading of a soul into inani- 
 mate things, is a matter of 
 common note. The letters of 
 the alphabet all have an expres- 
 sion for them like persons' 
 faces. E is a belligerent, con- 
 
242 SUB-FRESHMA N ' S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 ceited, positive character ; F is 
 sly, sneaking, with a smirk on 
 his thin face ; and so on. 
 David Copperfield identified a 
 certain washstand with Mrs. 
 Gummidge. Hans Andersen, 
 who retained the child's habit 
 of mind all through life, per- 
 sonifies in his story-books tops, 
 balls, and other playthings, pre- 
 cisely as children do. It is the 
 same with articles of furniture : 
 to an imaginative child every 
 room has an expression of its 
 own, and the things in it are 
 not dead, but have a kind of 
 life and humanity. There will 
 be little unnoticed nooks and 
 corners of the house that have 
 a peculiar significance to him 
 some recess that he likes to sit 
 in, some unused shelf or cubby. 
 Oddities of architecture attract 
 
SUB-FRESHMA N'S IMPRESSIONS. 243 
 
 him such as a space left here 
 and there, a corner cut off, a 
 step up or down from room to 
 room, a roof that slopes to the 
 floor, a closet of irregular shape. 
 Ledges are formed by projec- 
 tions or moldings, on which he 
 will range pennies or candies in 
 a row and leave them there till 
 he forgets them, and comes 
 upon them another day with all 
 the excitement of a fresh dis- 
 covery. 
 
 One of the best touches in 
 " Tom Brown's School Days at 
 Rugby" is where East describes 
 to Tom Brown the pleasures of 
 the Rugby institution known 
 as " singing." After supper, in 
 the summer twilight, the big 
 boys sit about the tables in 
 the little fives-court under the 
 library, and sing and drink 
 
244 SUB-FRESHMA N J S IMPRESSIONS. 
 
 beer ; while the little boys 
 " cut about the quadrangle be- 
 tween the songs, and it looks 
 like a lot of robbers in a cave'' 
 The man who wrote that knew 
 the heart of a boy. Is there 
 perchance in this part of the 
 world any man who cannot re- 
 call the bliss that filled him at, 
 say, the age of ten, when the 
 evenings began to grow long 
 and warm, so that he could 
 play outdoors after tea? What 
 an unfamiliar charm the de- 
 serted school-yard took on in 
 the soft gloaming, where we 
 lingered at " Every man in his 
 Own Den," until the boy who 
 ventured out into the center of 
 the field, crying the ancient 
 formula : 
 
 44 Here's a lead, 
 For Solomon's seed/' 
 
SUB-FRESHMAN'S IMPRESSIONS. 245 
 
 could hardly be seen for the 
 dusk ! And then to be let sit 
 out on the front steps till ten 
 o'clock with the " grown-ups," 
 and listen to their talk per- 
 haps even participate in their 
 lemonade while the fire-flies 
 twinkled in the high grass by 
 the currant bushes ! And to 
 wake afterward in the night and 
 hear the fountain splashing 
 monotonously in the asylum 
 grounds, and the hurdy-gurdy 
 of the lunatic negro who came 
 every night at moonrise to play 
 by those waters of Babylon ! 
 Oh, summer nights ! 
 
 THE END. 
 
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