help explain, but the human vinegar-cruet turned around and spat the
following through his clenched teeth:

"Gentlemen, I have been appointed to sit on this bench and I don't need
any help. Any more objections will be in contempt of court. Sergeant,
remove these young thugs and have them sent to the workhouse at once."

Maybe you don't think the college seethed when the news got out. There
were the leading lights of the school, including the president of the
Senior class, the chairman of the Junior promenade, two halfbacks, the
pitcher on the baseball team and the president of the Y. M. C. A., all
on the works for ten days, along with as choice an assortment of plain
drunks and fancy resters as you could find in ninety miles of mainline
railroad. The students fairly went mad and bit at the air. Even the
Faculty got busy and Prexy dropped over to the police court to square
it. He came out a minute later very white around the mouth. I don't know
what Old Maledictions said to him, but it was a great sufficiency, I
guess. He seemed as insulted as Lord Tennyson might have been if the
milkman had pulled his whiskers.

There wasn't a thing to be done. The Faculty appealed to the mayor, but
old Scroggs had some regular Spanish-bit hold on him in the way of a
short-time note, I guess, and he washed his hands of the whole affair.
Our college great men were hauled out to the works and served their
time. When they got out they were sights. They weren't strong on
sanitation in workhouses in those days. Even their friends shook hands
with them with tongs. Think of sixteen proud monarchs of the campus
making brick in striped suits, with a cross foreman who used to haul
ashes from the college campus lording it over them and tracing their
ancestry back through thirty generations of undesirable citizens! Nice,
wasn't it? Oh, very!

That was the beginning of a sad and serious year for Siwash. For the
first time Scroggs enjoyed college boys. Soaking students got to be his
specialty. We did our blamedest to behave, but you can't break off the
habits of generations in a week or two. Soon after the Seniors got out
the Mock Turtles, a Sophomore society, capacity thirty thousand quarts,
absent-mindedly tipped over a street car on their way home and were
jugged for thirty days. They had to enlarge the workhouse to take care
of them, and four of our best football players were retired from
circulation all through October. Think what that meant!