t did me a world of good. Dumped
in this community of over a thousand callow youths, three hundred in my
class alone and each one absorbed in getting acquainted, fitting in,
making friends and a place for himself, I was soon struggling for a
foothold as hard as the rest. Within a month the thing I wanted above
all else was to shed my genius and become "a good mixer" in the crowd.

This drew me at first from books to athletics. Though still slight of
build I was wiry, high-strung and quick of movement. I had a snub nose
and sandy hair, and I was tough, with a hard-set jaw. And I now went
into the football world with a passion and a patience that landed me at
the end of the season--one of the substitute quarterbacks on the
freshman team. I did not get into a single game, I was only used on the
"scrub" in our practice. This made for a wholesome humility and a real
love of my college.

The football season over, I tried for the daily paper. One of the
freshman candidates for the editorial Spring elections, I became a daily
reporter slave. Here at first I drew on my "queer" past, turning all my
"descriptive powers" to use. But a fat senior editor called "Pop"
inquired one day with a sneer, "For God's sake, Freshman, why these
flowers?" And the flowers forthwith dropped out of my style. At all
hours, day and night, to the almost entire neglect of studies, I went
about college digging up news--not the trivial news of the faculty's
dull, puny plans for the development of our minds, but the real vital
news of our college life, news of the things we were here for, the
things by which a man got on, news of all the athletic teams, of the
glee, mandolin and banjo clubs, of "proms," of class and fraternity
elections, mass meetings and parades. Ferreting my way into all nooks
and crannies of college life, ears keen for hints and rumors, alert to
"scoop" my eighteen reporter rivals--the more I learned the better I
loved. And when in the Spring I was one of the five freshman editors
chosen, the conquest was complete. No more artist's soul for me. I was
part and parcel of college life.

Together with my companions I assumed a genial tolerance toward all
those poor dry devils known to us as "profs." I remember the weary sighs
of our old college president as he monotoned through his lectures on
ethics to the tune of the cracking of peanuts, which an old darky sold
to us at the entrance to the hall. It was a case of live and let live.
He