was one of the very few funerals on record in which
the corpse succeeded in licking the mourners. I've got a small scar from
it now. You may think you're going home to that valuable baby of yours,
but you are not. You'll hear me out. I haven't talked with a Siwash man
for a month, and all of these Hale and Jarhard and Stencilmania fellows
give me an ashy taste in my mouth when I talk with them. It's about as
much fun talking college days with a fellow from another school as it is
to talk ranching with a New England old maid; and when I get hold of a
Siwash man you can bet I hang on to him as long as my talons will stick.
You just sit right there and start another Wheeling conflagration while
I tell you how we killed Hogboom to make a Siwash holiday.

I helped kill him myself. It was my first murder. It was an awful thing
to do, but we were desperate men. It was spring--in May--and not one of
us had a cut left. You know how unimportant your cuts are in the fall
when you know that you can skip classes ten times that year without
getting called up on the green carpet and gimleted by the Faculty. Ten
cuts seem an awful lot when you begin. You throw 'em away for anything.
You cut class to go downtown and buy a cigarette. You cut class to see a
dog fight. I've even known a fellow to cut a class in the fall because
he had to go back to the room and put on a clean collar. But, oh, how
different it is in May, when you haven't a cut left to your name and the
Faculty has been holding meetings on you, anyway; when classroom is a
jail and the campus just outside the window is a paradise, green and
sunshiny and fanned by warm breezes--excuse these poetries. And you can
sit in your class in Evidences of Christianity--of which you knew as
much as a Chinese laundryman does of force-feed lubrication--and look
out of the window and see your best girl sitting on the grass with some
smug oyster who has saved up his cuts. How I used to hate these chaps
who saved up their cuts till spring and then took my girl out walking
while I went to classes! Is there anything more maddening, I'd like to
know, than to sit before a big, low window trying to follow a psychology
recitation closely enough to get up when called on, and at the same time
watch five girls, with all of whom you are dead in love, strolling
slowly off into the bright distance with five job-lot male beings who
are dull and uninteresting and just cold-blooded enough to save their
cuts