ure frat
wrote to his mother the night before he was taken in and telegraphed her
when he found himself alive in the morning. There used to be
considerable rivalry between the frats at Siwash in the matter of giving
a freshman a good, hospitable time. I remember when the Sigh Whoopsilons
hung young Allen from the girder of an overhead railroad crossing, and
let the switch engines smoke him up for two hours as they passed
underneath, there was a good deal of jealousy among the rest of us who
hadn't thought of it. The Alfalfa Delts went them one better by tying
roller skates to the shoulders and hips of a big freshman football star
and hauling him through the main streets of Jonesville on his back,
behind an automobile, and the Chi Yi's covered a candidate with plaster
of Paris, with blow-holes for his nose, sculptured him artistically, and
left him before the college chapel on a pedestal all night. The Delta
Kappa Sonofaguns set fire to their house once by shooting Roman candles
at a row of neophytes in the cellar, and we had to turn out at one A. M.
one winter morning to help the Delta Flushes dig a freshman out of their
chimney. They had been trying to let him down into the fireplace, and
when he got stuck they had poked at him with a clothes pole until they
had mussed him up considerably. This just shows you what a gay life the
young scholar led in the days when every ritual had claws on, and there
was no such thing as soothing syrup in the equipment of a college.

Of all the frats at Siwash the Eta Bita Pies, when I was in college,
were preeminent in the art of near-killing freshmen. We used to call our
initiation "A little journey to the pearly gates," and once or twice it
looked for a short time as if the victim had mislaid his return ticket.
Treat yourself to an election riot, a railway collision and a subway
explosion, all in one evening, and you will get a rather sketchy idea of
what we aimed at. I don't mean, of course, that we ever killed any one.
There is no real danger in an initiation, you know, if the initiate does
exactly as he is told and the members don't get careless and something
that wasn't expected doesn't happen--as did when we tied Tudor Snyder to
the south track while an express went by on the north track, and then
had the time of our young lives getting him off ahead of a wild freight
which we hadn't counted on. All we ever aimed at was to make the
initiate so thankful to get through alive that h