e would love Eta Bita
Pie forever, and I must say we usually succeeded. It is wonderful what a
young fellow will endure cheerfully for the sake of passing it on to
some one else the next year. I remember I was pretty mad when my Eta
Bita Pie brethren headed me up in a barrel and rolled me downhill into a
creek without taking the trouble to remove all the nails. It seemed like
wanton carelessness. But long before my nose was out of splints and my
hide would hold water I was perfecting our famous "Lover's Leap" for the
next year's bunch. That was our greatest triumph. There was an abandoned
rock quarry north of town with thirty feet of water in the bottom and a
fifty-foot drop to the water. By means of a long beam and a system of
pulleys we could make a freshman walk the plank and drop off into the
water in almost perfect safety, providing the ropes didn't break. It
created a sensation, and the other frats were mad with jealousy. We took
every man we wanted the next fall before the authorities put a stop to
the scheme. That shows you just how repugnant the idea of being
initiated is to the green young collegian.

Of course, fraternity initiations are supposed to be conducted for the
amusement of the chapter and not of the candidate. But you can't always
entirely tell what will happen, especially if the victim is husky and
unimpressionable. Sometimes he does a little initiating himself. And
that reminds me that I started out to tell a story and not to give a
lecture on the polite art of making veal salad. Did I ever tell you of
the time when we initiated Ole Skjarsen into Eta Bita Pie, and how the
ceremony backfired and very nearly blew us all into the discard? No?
Well, don't get impatient and look in the back of the book. I'll tell it
now and cut as many corners as I can.

[Illustration: There wasn't a college anywhere around us that didn't
have Ole's hoofmarks all over its pride
_Page 33_]

As I have told you before, Ole Skjarsen was a little slow in grasping
the real beauties of football science. It took him some time to uncoil
his mind from the principles of woodchopping and concentrate it on the
full duty of man in a fullback's position. He nearly drove us to a
sanitarium during the process, but when he once took hold, mercy me, how
he did progress from hither to yon over the opposition! He was the
wonder fullback of those times, and at the end of three years there
wasn't a college anywhere tha