ray hairs
would protect them from the students, and when the boys had won a debate
or a ball game and wanted to burn a barn or two to cheer up the
atmosphere at evening, nothing at all was said--at least out loud.
Jonesville was meek enough, you bet. Why, back in the seventies the
students used to vote at town elections, and once for a joke they all
voted for old "Apple Sally" for president of the village board. Made her
serve, too. Talk about regulating! Did you ever see a farmer's dog go
out and try to regulate a sixty-horse-power automobile? That's about as
much as Jonesville would have regulated us thirty years ago.

But, of course, having a real peppery college in its midst, Jonesville
couldn't help but grow. People came and started boarding-houses. There
had to be restaurants and bookstores and necktie emporiums, too, and
pretty soon the railroad built a couple of branches into town and
started the division shops. Then Jonesville woke up and walked right
past old Siwash. In ten years it had street cars, paved streets,
water-works, a political machine and a city debt, as large as the law
would allow. And worse than that, it had a police force. It had nine
officers in uniform, most of whom could read and write and swing big
clubs with a strictly American accent. Nice sort of a thing to turn
loose in a quiet college town. This was long before my time, but they
tell me that the students held indignation meetings for a week after the
first arrest was made. You see, the students at Siwash always had their
own rules and lived up to them strictly. The Faculty put them on their
honor and that honor was never abused. Students were not allowed to burn
the college buildings nor kill the professors. These rules were never
broken, and naturally the boys felt rather insulted when the city turned
loose a horde of blue-coated busybodies to interfere with things that
didn't concern them.

Still, Siwash got along very well even after the police force was
organized. You see, after a town has had a college in its middle for
about fifty years, pretty much everybody in town has attended it at one
time or another. None of the police had diplomas, but it was no uncommon
thing to see an ex-member of a college debating society delivering
groceries, or an ex-president of his class getting up in an engine cab
to take the flyer into the city. For years every police magistrate was
an old Siwash man, and, though plenty of the boys would get arr