wonder how we ever had the nerve to imitate insanity
the way we did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, outgrowing my
belts every year, and sitting eight hours at a desk without exploding.
Am I the chap who climbed up sixty feet of waterspout a few short years
ago and persuaded the clapper of the college bell to come down with me?
Here you are all worn smooth on top and proprietor of an overflow
meeting in a nursery. In about ten minutes you'll be tearing your
coat-tails out of my hands because you have to go back home before the
eldest kid asks for a story. Are you the loafer who spent all one night
getting a profane parrot into the cold-air pipes of the college chapel?
Maybe you think you are, but I don't believe it. If I were to tip this
table over on you now you'd get mad and go home instead of handing me a
volume of George Barr McCutcheon in the watch-pocket. You're not the
good old lunatic you used to be, and neither am I.

Yes, times have changed. I don't feel as unfettered as I used to. There
are a few things nowadays that I don't care to do. When I come home at
night I take my shoes off and tiptoe to my room instead of standing
outside and trying to persuade my landlady that the house is on fire.
When I visit a friend in his apartments I do not, as a bit of repartee,
throw all of his clothes out of the window while he is out of the room,
and it has been a long time since I last hung a basket out of my window
on Saturday night, expecting some early-rising friend to put a pocketful
of breakfast in it as he came past from boarding-club. I am a slave to
conventions and so are you, you slant-shouldered, hollow-chested,
four-eyed, flabby-spirited pill-roller, you! The city makes more mummies
out of live ones than old Rameses ever did out of his obituary crop.

And yet it's no time at all since you and I were back at Siwash College,
making a dear playmate out of trouble from morning till night. I wonder
what it is in college that makes a fellow want to stick his finger into
conventions and customs and manners, to say nothing of the revised
statutes, and stir the whole mess 'round and 'round! When you're in
college, college life seems big and all the rest of the world so small
that what you want to do as a student seems to be the only important
thing in life--no matter if what you want to do is only to put a
free-lunch sign over the First Methodist Church. What does the college
student care for the U. S. A., the pla