Chapter II (1)

One day when from the fences along the pastures exultant meadow-larks were shouting "April," trilling the "r" ecstatically, and mild-hearted people were out after golden poppies, the Encina Freshmen, dark-browed plotters every villain of them, met in Pete Halleck's room. There was trouble brewing. First, Pete counted them with an air of mystery; then he pulled down the window shades, shut the transoms, and drew from the wash-stand a tangled mass of rope, two cans of paint and a coil of wire. With these beside him on the floor, he harangued the mob.

"We have got to get a rush out of 'em, fellows," he said, keeping his voice discreetly low, "and if they won't scrap, we'll force 'em. How many of you remember how to tie a knot?"

"We've had experience enough," spoke up a roly-poly boy; "it's the Sophs who need a lesson in tying."

"And we'll give it!"

Halleck drew up and looked so melodramatically important that the meeting snickered behind their collective hands. Just then there came a knock at the door. Halleck put his fingers to his lips; the crowd sat as if petrified; the roly-poly conspirator felt his bravado oozing out in youthful perspiration. The knocking came again, more imperatively, then a voice.

"Let me in, you crazy Freshies."

Silence in the room.

"Let me in. I know about you. You're all in there, talking rush. Hang your little pink skins, let me in!"

Still no answer.

"Pete Halleck, unlock your door. It's I--it's Frank Lyman, and I've something to say to you babies. Open up!"

The composite face of the gathering fell. With Lyman against them, who could be for them?--Frank Lyman, oracle of Encina and father-confessor of Freshmen!

Pete threw the paraphernalia into his wardrobe.

"The game's up, fellows."

He opened the door, admitting the Senior, and with him, alas! Sophomore Smith, President of his class. The sight of the enemy stirred Halleck.

"Say, shall we tie up the two of them?" cried he, when he had locked the door.

"Key down, Freshie, key down," said the Senior. "You boys pain me to the limit. Aren't you satisfied with tying up the Sophomores once without scrapping the whole year through?"

"What do you know about our wanting to scrap?"

"I'm on to you, Peter: You have a ton of rope and a barrel of paint somewhere about your den, and you're going out to-morrow to tie up the Sophs at the ball game. Now you fellows have had three rushes this year; when are you going to quit and give us a rest?"

Halleck held the position that delighted his soul,--center stage,--and he was a respecter of neither the Faculty nor his seniors.

"We're going to quit when we get even with you for pulling twenty-five lone Freshmen out of the Hall at night and making them rush against the whole Sophomore class; then's when we're going to quit. Observe?"

Halleck's shamefully fresh manner revived the drooping spirits of his men.

"See here, we'll call it off if you will," put in the Sophomore president.

"Yes, I guess you will," drawled Halleck. The mob howled. Smith's class was notoriously weaker at fighting than their own.

"We've rushed you three times," went on Cap; "you licked us the first time we fought; then you pulled us out in the mud the night after and did it again; but we got you the next week by strategy!"

"By a sneaking trick!"

"That's right!" chimed the Freshmen, "Pete's dead right!"

"Well, say," persisted Smith, "we're willing to quit as it is. The score stands two to one for you fellows, too."

"Two to nothing!" and again the infant class shouted approval while Lyman, the Senior, looked on amused.

"I really have a chap for you children," he said. "Just because rushing happens to be your game, you run it to death. How do you suppose the Faculty are going to look at this thing? If you want rushing choked off entirely next year, just keep on."

Airily ignoring Lyman's speech, Pete Halleck put his chin out at the Sophomore.

"Then you won't rush?"

"No," answered Cap, perfectly calm, "not even if you carry canes."

Halleck's face shone.

"Ai--i, boys, that's what we'll do! We'll get out there with canes to-morrow and we'll make 'em scrap!"

"Yes, you will! I believe it," sneered Smith. "You fellows are just fresh enough to queer yourselves that way."

"We'll queer _you_!" cried a valiant youngster "if you don't rush to-morrow we'll tie up your baseball team and cart 'em off to Redwood."

"Yes, sir, and we'll show you how a class president looks braided with bailing-rope,--we'll show you the pretty picture in a mirror, Mr. President,--even if we have to haul you out of the arms of twenty Roble dames."

Pete had taken his class-mates by storm and they piped acquiescence in thin Freshman voices. Smith flushed angrily.

Here Lyman interfered.

"All right, make joshes of yourselves if you want to," he said, not so good-natured as at first. "We have given you warning. Just open that door and you may go on with your little conspiracy."

"Come again when you can't stay so long," wittily yelled Pete down the hall. "I'll meet you on the field to-morrow."

"Oh, we'll be there," called back Lyman over his shoulder. "So will the Faculty," and with this covert hint the peacemakers turned the corner.

The sun shown brightly on the red-brown earth of the diamond when the Freshmen, the Sophomores and the Faculty met, according to agreement. The enterprising student-body management had chalked the Quad in conspicuous places:

RUSH of the YEAR,
Sophomore-Freshman Game.
Don't Miss It!

and the college responded. The co-eds were there, radiant in the snowiest of duck shirts, the gayest of shirt-waists. With them were "ladies' men," in variegated golf-stockings and gorgeous hat-bands. The Freshmen, gathered near first base, contrasted disreputably with this display; they wore old clothes, ragged hats, and they carried a miscellaneous collection of canes, borrowed from Juniors or stolen from Sophomores.

These stalwarts of the latest class were loaded with horns and noise-machines. Defiance exhaled from them. It was an impressive object-lesson on the evils of Freshman victories.

A few sensible Juniors went over and tried to quell their disturbance, but the infants were beyond any control of their class fathers; they had at their head the redoubtable Pete Halleck, with his perverted sense of the proprieties, and their uproar moderated not a bit. The Juniors returned to the bleachers, shaking their heads in disgust. Professor Grind, of the Committee on Student Affairs, was observed to write in his note-book. The Sophomores who saw this rejoiced that they were not in rushing clothes. Still the racket went on.

Jack Smith, in spotless tennis flannels, sat on the bleachers. Some girls from San Francisco, and one in particular as far as Cap was concerned, had come down with Tom Ashley's mother that morning, and he brought them over to the game. Pete Halleck picked him out at once and reminded the others of their promise.

Hannah Grant Daly, who did not know him to speak to, also picked him out. To her he looked more goodly than ever this afternoon, contrasted with the uncouthness of Halleck and others of her class. She watched him covertly, laughing and talking with the town girl beside him. He had laughed and talked very much like that to her, once, but he had forgotten it. That was natural; she had forgiven it long ago. Lillian Arnold, in the brightest of Easter hats, watched him, too.

The game was not exciting. The Freshmen were badly outplayed; the Sophomores galloped around the bases, and the babies' insolence grew with their opponents' score. As the last inning dragged its tedious length, the prospect of the Freshmen forcing a rush had become the important thing with the crowd. The fighting class limbered up for action. Now their third man struck out and the catcher's mask was off.

"Ready!" Pete Halleck's voice came out of the silence of the waiting crowd.

"All set!" and the class was up and off on a trot toward the Sophomore players, who were trying not to walk away any faster than was usual. One after another the baseball men were overtaken and went down in clouds of dust and hard language.

Yet the Sophomores would not rush. Frank Lyman had exhorted them simply, while the Freshmen were attacking their nine. One or two of the hot-heads hurried to the Hall for old clothes, but the majority stood looking on, angry but quiet.

"Now for Smith!" yelled Halleck. His men turned toward the co-ed section of the bleachers.

"Shall we get out of this?" Cap asked Ashley.

"Get out nothing! Stay right here with the girls. They wouldn't have the gall."

But the lust of fight was in the Freshman heart as the dust of fight was on the Freshman skin. They lined up, a ragged mass of impertinence, as near the women as they dared, and waited for the leader of the opposition. He chatted on, explaining the college rush to the girl with him, and gave no sign of moving.

"Shall we go in and take him?" asked an excited youngster.

"I'll give him a chance to come easy," said Halleck. He squared himself, adjusted his dusty hat, and went straight up the steps.

"Excuse me, Mr. Smith," said he, "you are forgetting an engagement you made with some of your friends yesterday."

This was the freshest thing in the history of the college. The Sophomore's fingers twitched.

"I think you can wait until later, Halleck," he said slowly. Then he turned to the girl.

From the time Halleck climbed the bleachers and went toward Smith and his guests, the spectators were stiff with astonishment; nobody did anything. They saw Halleck look for one moment into Smith's angry blue eyes, go down the steps, and bring back two big fellows. Before the Sophomore could move away from the girls, the three men had dragged him down the bleachers; one heave of Halleck's broad back and Smith was under them, with his wind gone, and a Freshman was getting a rope ready.

Then just as Ashley tore down the steps in a rage, a slip of a girl darted past him and put her hands on Halleck's shoulders; a small, sandy-haired girl with blazing eyes.

"Untie him, you great brutes!"

The man with the rope stared at her irresolutely, furtively slipping the knot tighter. By this time, Halleck was on his feet again and had recovered from his surprise.

"Excuse me," he began.

The girl looked him in the eye.

"Get that rope off!"

She was just a little thing, but her gaze never wavered. The direct gaze is something that wild beasts and bullies, Freshmen or otherwise, cannot bear. Pete Halleck looked around for moral support, but his men were shame-faced and the bleachers were silent. He bent down and slipped the rope off Smith's feet.

With the rout of their leader the whole fighting class, weighing some ten tons in battle trim, vanished like chaff before the spirit of one Freshie co-ed. By twos and threes they slouched away, trying to look unconcerned.

She turned to the man she had rescued.

"Are you much hurt, Mr. Smith?" she asked, her voice sweet with sympathy.

The Sophomore president stood there, rumpled, winded, flaming with embarrassment. Away up on the bleachers a girl in an Easter hat tittered and a general laugh followed. That laugh brought Smith to himself, but, before he could turn to thank her, Hannah, with a swift, frightened glance at the people, had fled to the Quadrangle. With swelling bosom and eyes stinging with restrained tears she leaned her face against a cool pillar and watched the swallows circle mistily about the red tiling.

People, coming from the ball-ground, passed her, unnoticed in the shadow. A man's voice, ringing with merriment, cried:

"Poor old Captain! I never saw him have such a chap. It's pretty hard on a man to have a girl do the Pocahontas act like that!"

A peal of Roble laughter answered.

"Pocahontas! O--oh, that's a cute name for her!"

HIS UNCLE'S WILL.

His Uncle's Will.

"It's a wise child that resembles its richest relative."

MODERN PROVERB.

Walter Olcott Haviland came to Stanford in September at the age of eighteen, and was rushed by the fraternities.

There is nothing remarkable about this, unless considered from Haviland's point of view. With his High School pin illuminating the vest on which a mystic Greek symbol was ere long to shine, he passed down the line of inquisitive Sophomores in Encina lobby, and into the Den of the Bear, presented his receipt for the room he had prudently engaged months ahead, and was duly bestowed within those plain white walls between which the Freshman begins a charmed existence of four years or four months, as the Committee may determine.

It is recorded that once before Commencement two Seniors came from fraternity houses at opposite ends of the campus and slept together the last night, as they had slept their first, in their Freshman room at the Hall. They had been rivals and in warring factions, but they lay down together in that place of beginnings, before a new heaven opened for them over a new earth. This is proof positive that you never forget your first room in the Hall. You may give it up for an attic in a chapter-house, you may go to live with young Freshleigh, with whom you are already chums, and whose apartment has the morning sun; but the first room is a foundation stone in your house of memories. Your trunk is brought in by the Student Transfer man (first lesson in self-help) and put down near the dreary-looking beds with their mattresses doubled on the foot-rail. Then, sitting down by the bare, shining table where, later on, theses are to be written and punches brewed, you stake out claims for the decorative material in your trunk. Certainly decorations are needed. The wardrobe stands forbiddingly against the wall. You will soon learn how to move it forward, reverse it, and adorn the back. The chilling whiteness of the walls is relieved only by one square, uncompromising mirror. An "Addersonian" tenderness has placed a yellow-flowered rug beside each bed. Otherwise, the place is barren.

If there is time before dinner, you swallow your loneliness and get out the home photographs and stand them up here and there, and the room is changed. These walls may become a scrap-book of four years' association with Alma Mater; the wardrobe may be hidden with kodaks of the gang and its exploits; but to-day, before you have even met the gang, you come into your own.

The newly-arrived Haviland, in the throes of this emotion, looks about him. He has put upon the ugly commode sundry pictures of his graduating class at the High School, each one dressed in his best, each flanked by floral offerings, each holding the impressive diploma. Later, these portraits will be less prominent in this college room.

He looks at them with a feeling of pity. It must be hard not to come to college. He is a lucky boy. Sliding unobtrusively into the hall-way, he strikes up an acquaintance with some other social Freshman, and together they watch the upper class-men coming in. Man after man drifts into the arms of waiting friends. How well they all know one another! Gradually he learns who and what these men are, the Seniors who manage the Hall or edit the College papers, the 'Varsity idols, the men who make College life. Important beings they seem to the Freshman, men who have reached heights above his modest possibilities, heroes who are great in the land. After dinner he mingles in the stag dances on the second floor hall-way; finding that a fellow class-man has neglected the graceful art, he takes him up on the third floor and teaches him the step. He is fitting in, you see. Then he hears the crowd surging into the lobby and picks up the chorus of "We'll rush the ball along," and before this first day is over he catches the contagion of that intangible, pervasive, never wholly fading thing, College spirit.

Jimmy Mason, Sophomore, hustling Student-Body assessments, drops in on him, and stops to chat awhile. Haviland learns that our team this year has lost such and such valuable men; that there are opportunities for a chap with football in him. The Freshman thinks of the day when the crowd at home cheered him as his school beat the Academy. He hands Mason the assessment money, being beautifully green yet. Like oases are these Freshmen to the Student-Body collector. Very likely the Sophomore rewards him by coming to his door, after the lights are out, at the head of a motley mob. They put him on the table, shivering in his nightie, and make derogatory remarks about his shape and his personal charms; then, having solemnly baptised him "Callipers," or whatever metaphorical name his physical architecture may suggest, they make him cavort for their delectation. If he shows modesty and courage in his unhappy obedience, he is greeted as a nice little boy and is introduced to his tormentors, who explain that the ritual was offered from the kindest motives. Doubtless it is this knowledge that makes him enjoy so keenly the sacrifice of fellow class-men, at which he is permitted to be present the next evening.

When he is spoken to mysteriously one night by "Pellams" Chase, a Junior from the Row, and told to put on his oldest clothes and to get his trunk-rope ("to rope up a Sophomore's trunk this time," hints the Junior), for the first time he sees his class as a whole, and stands shoulder to shoulder with them in the first College rush. The subsequent pullings and haulings, the poundings and jammings of this experience are happily compensated for if Chase takes him when all is over, binds up his bruises and tells him about fights of other days when there were giants upon the campus. After this, the College is never the immense, far-away thing it has seemed. He has seen his own class-men together, he has measured his strength with the dread Sophs, he is a University man.

Long before this the fraternities have spotted him.

* * * * *

"What are you going to do next hour?"

Haviland had just come out from his nine-thirty recitation and found "Cap" Smith waiting for him. Smith was a Beta Rho, and he had waited there in the same way for the same Freshman more than once in the month since the opening. It was Pellams who had discovered the boy, one night in Mason's room, where the Junior loafed half his time. Pellams had a big heart surely, for he had at once interested himself in Haviland, asking him over to dinner to meet the fellows. The Freshman knew it was the Juniors' duty to look after the infant class. This particular Junior was a College favorite,--Walt had seen that--and the boy from far-away New England went across the campus to the Row feeling that he was getting into good hands. The Rho house seemed about right. Dinner was a boisterous affair where the men took hands around the table and sang a rollicking accompaniment to Pellams' coon songs, strange table-manners that did not appear much to disturb Perkins' mother, who poured coffee at the end. Afterward they all sat out on the porch steps in the summer evening with their pipes, watching three of the men play catch. One of the fellows danced a shuffle while the rest stood around and clapped time and shouted, "Come on you _Nigger_!" They were very happy; it was a bully way to live; the homelike look of things appealed to the Freshman. Two of the fellows walked back to the Hall with him, and when they said good-night they shook his hand strongly and hoped they would see more of him.

This was the beginning. The college had become aware of his presence now. So far he had taken just nine meals that he had paid for, and had been away from the Hall one night out of four.

At the reception to the Freshmen he had been introduced to the same Faculty people six times over by members of as many fraternities, each presenting him as an individual entirely under their auspices and for whom they alone were responsible. Higgins, the sky-scraping Beta Phi, whom he had met only that evening, took him arm in arm up to the President's wife, and said:

"I want to introduce Mr. Haviland, a particular friend of mine. You will be good to him for my sake, won't you?" And the lady with a twinkle in her brown eyes, having recently promised to do the same for Jack Smith's sake, pledged her favors anew to the bewildered Walt.

Haviland did not quite understand this attitude of open arms. His first days in the Hall had not prepared him for it. He did not know that because he was well-bred, well-dressed and athletically promising, he was generally voted the prize Freshman of the year.

Then came the bids. There were only a few of the crowds that did not spike him; three who were manifestly not of his style and two who never presumed to enter the game until the others had made their winnings. All sorts of methods had been used. The first bid came early; he was given twenty-four hours to answer it, as "the Gamma Chi Tau never wait for a man." The Freshman, however, getting riper in the sun of experience, interpreted this to mean fear of competition, and so "declined with assurances of continued friendship." There was a crowd who slapped him on the back and called him "old man." Once he had been fresh enough to tell them a story, and they had laughed so uproariously over it that he was dreadfully embarrassed. The hospitality of another set seemed to consist of a sly but systematic attempt to get him drunk for some mysterious purpose of their own. He had put some of them to bed and felt superior, which was fatal to their chances.

He had been to many varieties of dinner-tables. Some of them were homelike; the talk at others had robbed him of appetite.

"What do you think of our crowd?" asked Roach, keenly, after a particularly disagreeable meal at which there had been much coarseness and a wreck of a tablecloth.

"They seem to me to be about the most congenial fellows I ever met," answered the disgusted but tactful Haviland, and Roach, going back to his house, announced authoritatively that the boy was theirs if they wanted him.

By this time he had learned the art of dodging invitations and remaining non-committal when asked, "Well, Walt, are you going to do the right thing?" Many a set, piled upon the beds in a fraternity room, sat up late talking him over and wondering how he was "coming on."

The Beta Phis, for instance, were in painful doubt. They were conscious of a comparatively poor stack-up, but their rushing energy was admirable, and once the persecuted Haviland had been obliged to ask a Beta Rho to hide him from them. Pellams and Smith were merry at dinner that night.

In his heart, Walt had about decided on Beta Rho. This crowd treated him with well-bred cordiality but with far less effusiveness than the others. He was pleased when they had let him mix with them without permitting him to forget the gulf between. This had put him off his guard so that he had grown accustomed to them. Observing him expertly from the corners of their eyes, they affected not to notice the way he blushed after having joined unconsciously in a Beta Rho song. One day he dropped over uninvited, and they understood. But in the first week of their acquaintance they had told him to hold off and be slow about pledging himself, and nothing more had been said so far.

On the night of the first rush, ending in complete victory for the Freshmen, Haviland had been so unfortunate as to clinch with Cap Smith, and he was largely responsible for the ignominious tying up of that husky Sophomore. He would much rather have been carted off himself, if it hadn't been for the class. He saw his Beta Rho chances vanishing. Pellams evidently did not know what had happened, he was so good to him after it, rubbing his bruises and dressing his scraped cheek. The next day Cap Smith came over and bid him to the fraternity. As a matter of principle, Haviland asked for a week to decide.

This indulgence was up to-day and now Cap was waiting for him after the second-hour class. Walt knew what answer he should give. He felt very contented.

"I got your mail for you," said Smith, handing him an envelope. "I've a letter of my own to read, so tackle yours while we walk along."

They went up toward the stock-farm, and the boy opened his mother's letter and read eagerly the home news and the affectionate questions. She enclosed, she said, the check which his uncle, who was putting him through College, had sent for October. Following this were a few words that made him stare hard at the road before him, as he and Smith strolled on. "Your uncle writes," said the letter, "that when he was at Amherst he was a fraternity man, and thinks you ought to be one, and he would like to have you join the society to which he belonged, the Beta Phi. I am sure, Wo dear, you will follow his wishes in a matter like this. It is not much to do in return."

Poor Walt! The Beta Rhos had never seemed such smooth fellows as at this moment when he felt himself suddenly pledged to the Beta Phis. In his mind's eye the Phis passed before him, one by one, particularly a certain long, unprepossessing member who had stayed till after twelve one night and bored him with a dreary recital of the prominence of his house in College politics, of the stump speeches that a former brother, now a historical personage, had made in Mayfield for prohibition, to say nothing of the essay prizes in philology that another ancient Phi had won in the dim past, when the chapter must have been more prominent than at present. In comparison with this record, the Rhos were numbskulls, dwelling in an amplified smoking-room, Walt must admit; their control of the Eleven and of the Glee Club was nothing. And now his future was black with philology prizes, with meals at which stew was a staple, and where only visitors had clean napkins.

The two fellows had by this time reached the trotting stables. They looked in at the beautiful, sleek racers, carefully blanketed and booted, and stroked an inquisitive nose or two, reached out over the white doors. Then they went on up the stock-farm yard and along the road to the bridge over San Francisquito. Here Smith stopped; leaning on the rail, he looked down at his blonde image in the shallow water below.

"Well, Professor, what's your answer? You ought to know your mind by this time, surely, and we want you bad, my boy."

"Cap, old man," began the Freshman, his voice a little husky, for he was sorely troubled, "you must know how I appreciate the way you fellows have treated me, and that I want you particularly for a friend." He stopped, but Smith kept silent. The fraternity had had refusals before; they usually began this way.

"I don't know just what I ought to say," went on the luckless Walt. "I really did think you were the crowd I should join, but something has come up and I can't say yes."

"What is it? Is it because you think we don't study enough? We do, though, a great deal more than it looks. This has been rushing season and we had to do the entertaining stunt a lot, and Pellams would give any crowd the look of bumming. We really do work hard the rest of the year."

"Oh, no," said Walt, "it isn't anything like that, Cap."

"There's somebody in the gang that you don't like, then; somebody that you don't know well and don't understand. Isn't that so? Who is it? You ought to tell me."

"I would, Cap, if that were the reason, but it isn't. I like every man of them all."

"What is it then?"

"Nothing that I can tell you." Poor Walt, he was ashamed of his uncle; Lyman at the Hall had told him that the whole Beta Phi fraternity was as scrubby as their Stanford chapter.

Cap's eyes had an angry gleam. "Somebody has been throwing mud," he said, kicking up a splinter from the bridge floor. "There are plenty of them to do it."

"It isn't that at all. I wouldn't be influenced that way," protested Haviland. "It's another matter."

"Well, I suppose this is final," said Smith, struggling hard with his disappointment. The Freshman's past attitude had paved the way for a different answer.

"Let's not say that," Walt began slowly. "Give me a while longer, Cap; things may change. I had hoped--" He broke off;--he could never tell Smith--he had not until that very moment told himself--how much he had looked forward to being a Rho.

"Things may change," he said again as Smith turned savagely and started back. He was trying to compromise, but he had no idea how any change was to come about. He brooded over it in his room that night, and the more he pondered the more clearly he realized that the debt to his uncle stood in his way. Plainly, he was up against it. He made the foot of his iron bedstead jingle with a petulant kick, and, muttering the Phi yell in a savage tone, went off to sleep.

At luncheon the next day at the Phi house, the Freshman was so friendly and so gracious that two of the Chapter went out into the kitchen and shook hands. Had he not inquired solicitously about the fraternity's position in Amherst, had he not expressed great pleasure at learning of their high political standing back there? Never a word had they heard of his uncle, however. The Freshman who is in his own neighborhood does not donate additional arguments.

The Phi house was shaken to its foundations. This was the greatest piece of work for years. Walt was immediately invited to stay for dinner and to spend the night and the next day, but although it was Saturday, he declined. Even the tempting bait of a Populist campaign rally moved him not.

The days passed and Walter Olcott Haviland was an unhappy child. His sudden intimacy with the Phis could not escape the astonished Rhos; he was sensitive to the change in their manner, slight as it was. He would have been glad enough to have stayed out of fraternities altogether if it would have helped matters. There was a very jolly set in the Hall, men who had refused far better bids than the Phis. Jimmie Mason and Frank Lyman, "Peg" Langdon and Blake, the fullback; these fellows, as prominent as any in College, were in the dormitory crowd; they used one another's rooms and tobacco and clothes with the utmost good nature. Walt had been fond of the big building from his first day there; he could have had a happy time with this independent set.

He was not made any happier by Lyman's saying, "Whatever you do, don't join the Phis. They've no standing here, and you won't help yourself any." Freshmen usually listened to what Lyman said. But Haviland had thought and reasoned and struggled with himself, and had come to a conclusion. To write to his uncle, "I have joined the Phis because you are one," would be worth any sacrifice. Perhaps he could work to improve the crowd a little after he was one of them. At least there was no reason why they need be his only friends.

He went to the lab one afternoon with his decision made. If the Phis asked him to dinner, he would go and put his head on the block.

As he came along toward the main entrance he saw Andrew Higgins, the longest, lankiest Phi of them all, bearing down upon him. His heart sank, but his resolution was firm, and he looked his fate in the face. When his executioner had almost reached him, somebody touched his shoulder; it was Smith.

"Before your frat brother gets hold of you," muttered Cap, drawing Walt aside, "I want to speak to you. The boys must have your final answer to-day."

The "frat brother" was not to be turned down. He loomed up steadily in their direction. Walt was miserable. It was the beginning of the end.

"I'll give it to-night," he said hurriedly, as the Phi reached them.

"Will you come to dinner?"

Haviland wanted one sunbeam before the darkness.

"Yes, I'll come, Cap," and turned to shake hands with the Phi, whose invitation was frozen half-way in his throat. Now the Beta Phis were not of the people who let to-morrow get anything while to-day lasts, so Higgins asked Walt to come down after dinner for the night, and the unhappy boy, half-hearing, promised.

It was a gloomy dinner for the Freshman, baked funeral meats and he the corpse. Mrs. Perkins gave him a motherly smile and told him in a careful undertone that she was glad he was going to be one of her boys, after which he felt childishly close to tears. He sat out-doors with the others and smoked and joined weakly in the singing. The roses clinging to the porch had never been so sweet; the Rho dog had never nosed so affectionately against his shoulder. There was to be no substitute for this. He wished he had never seen the campus. His mood communicated itself to the others and things grew slow. One by one the fellows slipped away with various excuses. Finally Cap said:

"Come up to the room," and Haviland went up stairs with the emotions one carries to the dentist.

Smith threw himself on the bed and motioned Walt to a chair at his study table. They tried a little general conversation, but failed mournfully. The Freshman had a wretched feeling that this room was home to him. He had slept here so often and he knew every athletic picture and trophy around it. There had been something said about his living here with Cap after Christmas. The clock ticked spitefully at him.

Smith's voice, deep and quiet, broke the pause.

"What's the good word, Professor?"

Walt swallowed a lump, nervously opened a book that lay on the table, then looked at the big red sweater on the bed, and said:

"I can't do it, Cap."

Smith kicked a pillow of which he thought a great deal almost into the grate, and said with fine scorn:

"When do you join the Phis?"

"I don't know," said Van, drearily.

"Well, I think you're nutty; it's the cheesiest gang in College."

The battle had begun. Walt might as well practice his defense at once, so he said with a little dignity:

"My uncle is a Phi, and it is his wish."

"So that is it!" Such a reason was no discredit to the Rhos; therefore it was the harder to accept. "You give me a jolt, Walt. Just because your uncle is in a rotten fraternity you must crawl into the heap, too. I'd see him hanged first before I'd queer myself with those yaps."

Cap went on even more impatiently, but the Freshman heard not a word. He was staring at the book open before him.

"Cap, what book is this?"

"The fraternity catalogue."

"What fraternity?"

"Ours, of course; whose did you think it was, the--"

Walt gave a hysterical whoop and flung himself over the footboard upon the astonished Smith. He rolled him over the bed and sent him to join the pillow on the floor; then, sitting up on the bed with tousled hair and shining eyes, he said:

"Cap, if you still want me, I say yes!"

"What's the matter with you?" asked the amazed Sophomore from the rug.

"Nothing!" shouted Walt. "I see the whole thing; uncle's awful writing--mother got it Phi instead of Rho--she doesn't know one from the other--his name's in your book. Hoo!" and he sprang on Smith again and lifted him bodily.

The Chapter had been waiting. Hearing propitious sounds, they came stringing in, and Haviland's explanation, with the celebration that followed it, took such a length of time that the longest, lankiest Phi fell asleep in the parlor and his lamp burned out about two.

THE INITIATION OF DROMIO.

The Initiation of Dromio.

"I know a prof.,--not much to see,--
Take care!
Mistakes are made here frequently,
Beware!"

The Rho fraternity called Walter Haviland "professor." Haviland was one of their pledged Freshmen. In rushing, a good nickname, gracefully used, is a great thing. It puts a Freshman considerably at his ease, and impresses him with the feeling that he belongs to the set.

The first day that Haviland came over to dinner, Bob Duncan, a Senior, spoke up from his end of the table: "Are you a relative of Lamb, the botany professor?"

"I have never heard that I am," answered the Freshman.

"Are you in any of his classes?"

"No; I'm not going to take botany."

"If you were, I don't believe the class could tell you apart. Doesn't he look like Lamb to beat the band, fellows?"

"He's a little heavier than the prof.," suggested Smith.

"Oh, perhaps he is a little," admitted Duncan, "but their height is the same to an inch, and the facial resemblance is great."

"He can't look much like a professor," laughed the Freshman.

"He doesn't," said Duncan, "they've got him down in the register as an associate professor in botany, but that's all he has to his credit. He gets taken for a Freshman right along. New students ask him if he is registered and what his major is--sure they do."

"They say there was a big farmer who went in to register in botany and wouldn't do business with poor Lamb at all," said Perkins. "He said he wasn't so green as he looked, and he knew all about these students who make believe they're professors and give fake examinations. The professor was as red as a beet."

"I don't blame him," said Duncan. "Why, the man is married and has two children."

"Are you sure they're his," said Pellams, seriously. "I've seen them with him on the Quad, but I thought perhaps he'd borrowed them for effect, to keep off the Senior girls."

"The year he came here the Beta Phis tried to rush him, didn't they?" asked Smith. Duncan scowled across the table at the Sophomore. This was Haviland's first day at the house; they could josh other frats later, if he came their way; just now it was a break.

Ted Perkins interrupted tactfully. "Have some of this Spanish goo? The English department here is crazy on theatricals. They will probably want you for a grand revival of the Comedy of Errors."

"If I were you," came in Smith, to cover up his slip, "I would go over and draw his salary some day. They would pay it all right if they didn't look twice and ask questions."

"Better look out," added Pellams, in his solemn drawl, "those babies of his will be claiming you in the Quad in front of all Roble some sunny day, and then you might just as well leave college!"

This table-talk gave the men an idea for a nickname, and so, when they knew the Freshman a little better, they slipped an arm through his and called him "Professor." It was really the most civilized nickname in the house.

One Thursday, at football practice, about two weeks after Haviland had agreed to join, Pellams spoke to him.

"Professor, on Saturday night you are to be initiated. Bring over your suit-case with a change of under-clothes and a pair of old shoes."

"I was going up to San Francisco on Saturday," murmured Haviland, his heart beating a bit faster, "but----"

"You have changed your mind," finished Pellams, quietly. "We will have dinner as usual, and you will be on time, please. So long, Professor."

Haviland was not wholly at peace as he walked back to the dormitory. A Freshman never becomes especially hilarious in anticipating his initiation night; there is an uncertain certainty about it that he cannot entirely laugh away, however much natural bravery he may have, however hoary he may be in high school fraternity experience. At the chapter house, where things have been made so pleasant, careless remarks are dropped, full of sinister meaning. It is not nearly so comfortable there now, and Freshman Damocles wishes the suspense were over.

When the fateful Saturday dawned, Walter had a strong impulse to go to the city as he had originally planned. Pellams had explained to him that his having held out so long before agreeing to join would probably mean his "getting it unusually hard." He knew that of all the fraternities, the Rhos were the most severe in their initiations--one of the Rhos had told him so.

At the post-office that morning he met Professor Lamb starting for a day's botanizing in the foothills. He did not know the instructor, but he envied him as he leaned on his wheel and watched the botany man take the fence and start off across the brown pastures toward the hills beyond the lake. There certainly was a strong resemblance.

"Oh," groaned the candidate for fraternity privileges, "I wish it was a case of his resembling me instead of my looking like him. I only wish I was the prof, now, I'd change places quickly enough. I'm afraid I'm a coward."

He wondered if they guessed how scared he was; he hoped not. He pedaled around to the courts, where Cap. Smith was waiting to play tennis, and he put on an infant bravado which secretly pleased the Sophomore. After a few sets Cap. put his racket under his arm.

"No more tennis, Professor," he said, with meaning; "you'd better rest most of the day. Get out your work for Monday, you won't feel much like studying to-morrow, you know, and don't forget to be at the house at six sharp." Then, since the Freshman had visibly wilted, Smith grinned all the way across the field.

Haviland suspected two other fellows in the Hall of being in a state of mind similar to his own, but as he had been instructed to keep the matter absolutely secret, he could not turn to them for relief. He worried through the long Saturday, making futile attacks on the work prescribed for Monday, strumming in an aimless way on his banjo, and finally writing his mother a letter between the lines of which she at once read malaria.

Dinner at the Rho house was the most miserable meal he had ever choked his way through. A half-dozen graduates were present, and some men from the Berkeley chapter. These visitors seemed a solemn lot, and conversation included the candidates only now and then. During the lulls in the talk, the Freshmen made audible sounds trying to swallow their food; this was so embarrassing that they gave up the effort to eat, only gulping water now and then during talk. It was a relief when some one touched each Freshman quietly, and the condemned youngsters followed upstairs, their faces wearing pitiful dumb-victim-at-the-altar expressions, or trying with ghastly smiles to show how little they cared.

The young moon, sloping toward the shaggy rim of the Palo Alto hills soon after eight o'clock, looked down into the pasture lands back of the campus. There she saw Walter Haviland, blindfolded and with a rope about his waist. Three other Freshmen were in a similar condition in different parts of the field. Haviland had been intrusted to the tender mercy of Cap. Smith, a 'Varsity man, and Pellams Chase, greatest of all joshers. This was indeed a high honor. Two of the less distinguished members hovered about them, eager to add their services. Their objective point was a fence skirted by a gully through which water ran in the winter time; into this gully they flung the luckless Walt and left him there while they took their ruthless course to a part of the field where another group of men had gathered.

The moon touched delicately the redwood trees upon the western ridge, then slipped down beyond them. With her last look into the field she saw Haviland lying on his face at the bottom of the gulch. She saw also Professor Lamb, of the botany department, hurrying home cross-country from the day's collecting on upper San Francisquito Creek, tired, dusty, bedraggled, thinking with an unscientific enthusiasm of the hot dinner awaiting his homecoming. The lingering moon, peering over the mountain edge, saw the instructor clear the fence and plunge into the shadowy gulch. Then, before she could see what happened next, the stern law of the solar system drew her reluctant down.

The four men who had charge of Haviland came back from their consultation with the others. When they were near the place where they had left their victim, a man appeared, climbing out. This called for investigation; they bounded along through the gulch and came up with the fellow. To their surprise it was Haviland with his bandage off and the rope nowhere. It was the first time a man had ever tried to give them the slip. He should pay for it! Cap. Smith threw himself on the Freshman at the first glimpse of his face. In a jiffy there was a new bandage over his eyes and another rope coiled around his waist; this time it included his hands. He struggled resolutely, but in silence, for his breath had left him when he struck the ground with Smith on top.

They seized him firmly and ran him at breakneck speed over a terrible course, heading for an old well which waters a back pasture. Here they stopped, spent with running.

"On your knees, Professor!" gasped Pellams, with as much authority as his lack of breath would allow.

The panting victim remained standing.

"Down!" accompanied by a resounding blow of a barrel stave.

Still no movement, but a gurgle was heard as though speech was being labored for.

Biff!

The unfortunate creature sprawled beside the well, but struggled up again to a half-kneeling posture.

"This--must--stop!" he gasped, painfully. "It--is--an--outrage. I--am----"

"No levity, sir!" said Smith. "You've got to do what we say, Professor, or you won't get in at all."

"I don't--want--to--get--in," panted the poor wretch in desperate protest. "It's--a--mistake--I----"

"See here, Professor; where's your nerve? Be a man! You'll never make a Rho at this rate. Brace up, for Heaven's sake! Rise, Neophyte."

They gave the rope a cruel wrench, which brought their captive to his feet.

"Let's kill him," whispered one of the men. Never before had there been so shameful a display of the white feather.

"We'll duck him."

They brought their Freshman to the brink of the well. They tightened the rope under his arms, and, before he could divine their intentions, they were lowering him down the slippery side. When his feet struck the cold water he struggled violently, shouting something which his splashing and the echo of the well made unintelligible. Presently they hoisted him, dripping and speechless with rage.

"Thou hast now been cleansed of thy sin and cowardice, O Neophyte," declaimed Pellams. "Forward to the joys that await thee!"

They dragged him home on the run, taking the road this time and making all haste to the house. The half-dead initiate had to be carried upstairs. Smith took off the rope and told him to strip for a bath. The victim sat on the edge of the Sophomore's bed and shook his head feebly. He was evidently exhausted.

"Come, hurry up, Haviland," said Cap. He felt a brutal impatience to see what the barrel staves had done to the fellow's back. "Get bathed and put on your dry clothes and be ready for the feed."

The initiate raised his hands slowly and untied the bandage. He blinked a moment at Smith, then he said huskily, "I am not Haviland, Mr. Smith, nor do I want any 'feed.' I want to know what this means." There was no anger in his voice, only great weariness.

The freezing truth dawned on the horrified student. His first impulse was to rush out of the house and to keep running. He managed to stammer:

"Where's Haviland?"

"I don't know where Haviland is," muttered the tired instructor. "I don't know who Haviland is. If I have taken his place I am ready to change again." He looked down upon his clothes, stuccoed with tarweed burrs and wet mud.

Then Jack Smith laughed aloud.

"Professor, when we've found Haviland, and you've seen him, you'll understand the whole horrible mistake, and----"

"There was no mistake," said the other, coldly, "you called me Professor while you were beating me."

This only set Smith off again.

"That's our name for Haviland. You see he looks like you--oh, I can't explain it to you, Professor; but when you've seen the man you'll forgive us, I know you will. And you've simply got to stay to our feed now, if we have to tie you up again to keep you here."

Professor Lamb, of the botany department, smiled wanly.

"I think I will take a bath, anyway," he sighed.

THE SUBSTITUTED FULLBACK.

The Substituted Fullback.

"Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain!
I know not, faith, not I;
Is it more strange the dead should walk again
Than that the quick should die?"
ALDRICH.

"Frank Lyman, Football Manager, Stanford University:

"Blake died three forty-five. Body going East. I return five
train. DIEMANN."

When he had sent this message to the University, the instructor in Psychology went gloomily down to the Third and Townsend Street station.

There was nothing more to be done just then. He had telegraphed to the dead athlete's parents; the undertakers had their instructions about shipping the body to Ohio, and the hospital bills would be arranged for later. He slipped into a single seat at the back of the car to avoid the chance of a travelling acquaintance. Now that the business part of it was over, he could not talk to anyone.

The whole thing had been so sudden that it was hard to feel the truth. Barely a week ago he had stood on the practice field at the University, following Blake's splendid play and listening to the shouting of the crowded bleachers, who idolized their great fullback with the absolute idolatry of a college crowd. It was not easy to believe that all this physical manhood, all this intellectual promise, had been snuffed out like a candle before their very eyes.

Diemann pressed his face against the car window and stared out at the terraced produce gardens slipping dimly by in the early November dusk. Between him and the dead fullback there had been such companionship as comes now and then to an instructor under thirty and a man nearing the end of his college course. When Diemann, just home from Germany, came West to teach Psychology, he found young Blake the college hero. The new instructor had himself been a noted back; he still hovered somewhere between enthusiast and fiend. At Stanford he at once identified himself with the football men, and they welcomed him gladly as assistant coach. During that first season, two years ago, he had come to know and like Fred Blake. Later, the fullback took Diemann's course in Psychology, and to the elder man's gratification, developed a passion for the subject. The instructor recognized the quality of the athlete's mind, and before long the two were working together, reading and discussing along the line of the teacher's special interest.

Coming home from the sober materialism of Leipzig, Diemann had realized more fully than ever how thoroughly the interest in matters occult had pervaded the mind of his native country. To this department of Psychology he turned with an admitted interest in things unseen and a confidence in the restraint of his University training. He felt that he stood barely upon the threshold of the subject, held back by material prejudice and the conservatism of little faith; yet his enthusiasm grew daily. He weighed the evidence of phenomena with an impartiality that other people pronounced belief. The attitude of those about him was for the most part unsympathetic. Some to whom he had made furtive confidences called him "spooky," a spiritualist; but he was merely an investigator, trying to be fair. It was an alluring study; perhaps he ran the risk of over-enthusiasm--he had known people who had spiritualized the palpably material--but he was guarding against this danger; it would take an exceptional impulse ever to get him to that point.