days, that
sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep at night for fear I'll find myself
in an ethnological museum when I wake up the next morning, with people
making funny cracks about the strange clothes I was wearing when they
caught me.

I'm not constitutionally a back number myself either. I come as near
wearing next year's styles as most fellows, and I had my wrist broken
cranking an automobile before most Americans believed the things would
go. I was tired of this hand-chopped furniture fad years ago, and if you
hand me any slang that I can't catch on the fly you'll have to make it
up right now. But there's no use talking. No one man can keep up with
this world all by himself. Sometimes I get to thinking I'm so far ahead
that I can afford to sit down and get a breath or two, and when I get up
I have to eat dust for the next year trying to catch up.

Take colleges, for instance. I've been conceited enough to think that
these flappy little college boys, with their front hair brushed back
down on their necks, couldn't show me anything that I wasn't tired of.
I've kept up to date on college things, I've always flattered myself.
You might lose me now and then on some new way of abusing lettuce during
a salad course, perhaps, but as far as looking startled at anything that
might be said or done around a college campus goes, I've had a notion
that I wasn't in the learning class--which shows how much I knew about
it. This morning a gosling from the old school--a Sophomore--came in and
visited with me for a few minutes, on the strength of the fact that he
knew my baby brother in high school. We hadn't talked a minute before he
handed me "pragmatism" and "zing-slingers." While I was rolling my eyes
and clawing for a foothold he confessed that he was the best glider in
college. When I remarked that I had been somewhat of a glider myself,
but that I had preferred the twostep, he laughed and explained that he
was captain of the aviation team--that they had three gliders and were
finishing a monoplane that had a home-made engine with concentric
cylinders.

Can you beat it? There I was, Petey Simmons' best friend, and personally
acquainted with eleven thousand forms of college excitement, listening
to an infant with my mouth open and stopping him every few words to say
"land sakes," "dew tell" and "what d'ye mean by that?" I never was so
humiliated in my life, but there's no getting around the truth. I've
been ten years out of coll