Crickets were bold and quarrelsome beside him. He knew more musty
history than any one in the state and he could without flinching tell
how Alexander waded over his knees in blood; but rather than take off
his coat where the world would have seen him he would have died. He was
just that modest and conventional. He had to come to his classes through
the back of the campus up the hill; and they do say that one day, when
half a dozen of the Kappa Kap Pajama girls were sitting on the low stone
wall at the foot of the hill swinging their feet, he cruised about the
horizon for a quarter of an hour waiting for them to go away in order
that he might go up the hill without scorching his collar with blushes.
That was the kind of a roaring lion Professor Sillcocks was.

Well, to get back from behind Robin Hood's barn, Professor Sillcocks had
a great hobby. He believed that college boys should indulge in
athletics, but that they should do it with their fingers crossed. Those
weren't his exact words, but that was what he meant. It was noble to
play games, but wicked to want to win. In his eyes a true sport was a
man who would start in a foot race and come in half a mile behind
carrying the other fellow's coat. Our peculiar style of pushing a
football right through the thorax of the whole Middle West nearly made
him shudder his shoes off and every fall in chapel he delivered a talk
against the reprehensible state of mind that finds pleasure in the
defeat of others. We always cheered those talks, which pleased him; but
he never could understand why we didn't go out afterward and offer
ourselves up to some high-school team as victims. It pained him greatly.

Naturally Professor Sillcocks participated with great enthusiasm in the
work of pruning our line-up, and after the Faculty had thrown up its
hands he climbed right in and led a new campaign. We had to admire the
scientific way in which he went about it, too. For a man whose most
violent exercise consisted of lugging books off a top shelf, and who had
learned all he knew about football from the Literary Pepsin or the
Bi-Weekly Review, he got onto the game in wonderful style. Somehow he
managed to learn just who were our star players--what they played and
how badly they were needed--and then he went to work to quarantine these
players.

First thing we knew the Millersburg game, which was always a fierce
affair, arrived; and on the morning of the game Bumpus and Van
Eiswaggon, our t