ing festival at our
expense any time. We lived in a perpetual state of fear. Some day we
felt that the normal school would come down and beat us. That would be
the limit of disgrace. After that there would be nothing left to do but
disband the college and take to drink to forget the past.

But Bost changed all that in one year. He didn't care to show any one
how to play football. He was just interested in making the player afraid
not to play it. When you went down the field on a punt you knew that if
you missed your man he would tell you when you came back that two stone
hitching-posts out of three could get past you in a six-foot alley. If
you missed a punt you could expect to be told that you might catch a
haystack by running with your arms wide open, but that was no way to
catch a football. Maybe things like that don't sound jabby when two
dozen men hear them! They kept us catching punts between classes, and
tackling each other all the way to our rooms and back. We simply had to
play football to keep from being bawled out. It's an awful thing to have
a coach with a tongue like a cheese knife swinging away at you, and to
know that if you get mad and quit, no one but the dear old Coll. will
suffer--but it gets the results. They use the same system in the East,
but there they only swear at a man, I believe. Siwash is a mighty proper
college and you can't swear on its campus, whatever else you do.
Swearing is only a lazy man's substitute for thinking, anyway; and Bost
wasn't lazy. He preferred the descriptive; he sat up nights thinking it
out.

We began to see the results before Bost had been tracing our pedigrees
for two weeks. First game of the season was with that little old dinky
Normal School which had been scaring us so for the past five years. We
had been satisfied to push some awkward halfback over the line once,
and then hold on to the enemy so tight he couldn't run; and we started
out that year in the same old way. First half ended 0 to 0, with our
boys pretty satisfied because they had kept the ball in Normal's
territory. Bost led the team and the substitutes into the overgrown barn
we used for a gymnasium, and while we were still patting ourselves
approvingly in our minds he cut loose:

"You pasty-faced, overfed, white-livered beanbag experts, what do you
mean by running a beauty show instead of a football game?" he yelled.
"Do you suppose I came out here to be art director of a statuary
exhibit? Does any