until the springtime? If there is I've never had it.

In this spring of umpty-steen it seemed as if only one ambition in the
world was worth achieving--that was to get out of classes. Most of us
had used up our cuts long ago. The Faculty is never any too patient in
the spring, anyhow, and a lot of us were on the ragged edge. I remember
feeling very confidently that if I went up before that brain trust in
the Faculty room once more and tried to explain how it was that I was
giving absent treatment to my beloved studies, said Faculty would take
the college away from me and wouldn't let me play with it never no more.
And that's an awful distressing fear to hang over a man who loves and
enjoys everything connected with a college except the few trifling
recitations which take up his time and interfere with his plans. It hung
over five of us who were trying to plan some way of going over to
Hambletonian College to see our baseball team wear deep paths around
their diamond. We were certain to win, and as the Hambletonians hadn't
found this out there was a legitimate profit to be made from our
knowledge--profit we yearned for and needed frightfully. I wonder if
these Wall Street financiers and Western railroad men really think they
know anything about hard times? Why, I've known times to be so hard in
May that three men would pool all their available funds and then toss up
to see which one of them would eat the piece of pie the total sum
bought. I've known Seniors to begin selling their personal effects in
April--a pair of shoes for a dime, a dress suit for five dollars--and to
go home in June with a trunk full of flags and dance programs and
nothing else. I've known students to buy velveteen pants in the spring
and go around with big slouch hats and very long hair--not because they
were really artistic and Bohemian, but because it was easier to buy the
trousers and have them charged than it was to find a quarter for a
haircut.

That's how busted live college students with unappreciative dads can get
in the spring. That's how busted we were; and there was Hambletonian,
twenty miles away, full of money and misguided faith in their team. If
we could scrape up a little cash we could ride over on our bicycles and
transfer the financial stringency to the other college with no trouble
at all. But it was a midweek game and not one of us had a cut left. That
was why we murdered Hogboom.

It happened one evening when we were sitting o