t didn't have Ole's hoofmarks all over its
pride. Oh, he was a darling. To see him jumping sideways down a football
field with the ball under his arm, landing on some one of the opposition
at every jump and romping over the goal line with tacklers hanging to
him like streamers would have made you want to vote for him for
Governor. Ole was the greatest man who ever came to Siwash. Prexy had
always been considered some personage by the outside world, but he was
only a bump in the background when Ole was around.

Of course we all loved Ole madly, but for all that he didn't make a
frat. He didn't, for the same reason that a rhinoceros doesn't get
invited to garden parties. He didn't seem to fit the part. Not only his
clothes, but also his haircuts were hand-me-down. He regarded a fork as
a curiosity. His language was a sort of a head-on collision between
Norwegian and English in which very few words had come out undamaged. In
social conversation he was out of bounds nine minutes out of ten, and it
kept three men busy changing the subject when he was in full swing. He
could dodge eleven men and a referee on the football field without
trying, but put him in a forty by fifty room with one vase in it, and he
couldn't dodge it to save his life.

No, he just naturally didn't fit the part, and up to his senior year no
fraternity had bid him. This grieved Ole so that he retired from
football just before the Kiowa game on which all our young hearts were
set, and before he would consent to go back and leave some more of his
priceless foot-tracks on the opposition we had to pledge him to three of
our proudest fraternities. Talk of wedding a favorite daughter to the
greasy villain in the melodrama in order to save the homestead! No
crushed father, with a mortgage hanging over him in the third act, could
have felt one-half so badly as we Eta Bita Pies did when we had pledged
Ole and realized that all the rest of the year we would have to climb
over him in our beautiful, beamed-ceiling lounging-room and parade him
before the world as a much-loved brother.

But the job had to be done, and all three frats took a melancholy
pleasure in arranging the details of the initiation. We decided to make
it a three-night demonstration of all that the Siwash frats had learned
in the art of imitating dynamite and other disintegrants. The Alfalfa
Delts were to get first crack at him. They were to be followed on the
second night by the Chi Yi Sighs, wh