The whole
college went up, just before the game with Hambletonian, and knelt on
the sidewalk before Judge Scroggs' house. He set the dog on us. Said
afterwards he wished the dog had been larger and hadn't had his supper.
A month later four members of the glee club tried to do our favorite
stunt of putting the horse in the herdic and hauling him home, and it
cost them twenty-nine days--just enough to break up the club. The whole
basket-ball team got thirty days because they took the bronze statue off
the fountain in the public square one night, laid him on the car tracks
in some old clothes, and had the ambulance force trying to resuscitate
him. Nobody had ever objected to this little joke before, but it cost us
the state championship and two of the team left school when they got
out. Said they'd come to Siwash for a college education, not for a
course of etymology in a workhouse.

It was terrible. We scarcely dared to cut out our mufflers enough to
whistle to each other on the street. By spring we were desperate. We had
lost the basket-ball championship. The glee club was ruined.
Muggledorfer had bumped us in football--that was the year before Ole
Skjarsen came to school--and college spirit at Siwash had been gummed up
until it could have been successfully imitated by a
four-thousand-year-old mummy. Our college meetings resembled the
overflow from a funeral around the front steps. We used to shut down all
the windows, say "shsh" nine times, and then write out our college yell
on curl papers and burn the papers. You could have swapped Siwash off
for a correspondence school without noticing any difference in the
reverberations. That was Petey Simmons' first year in college--as a
matter of fact, he was a Senior prep. I've told you more or less about
Petey before. He was the only son of one of these country bankers who
manage to get as much fun out of a half million as a New Yorker could
out of a whole railroad. Petey was a little chap who had always had what
he wanted and would cheerfully sit up all night thinking up new things
to want. He wasn't a Freshman yet, but he could give points to all the
college in the matter of explosive clothes and nifty ways of being
expensive to Dad. He couldn't get along without coat-cut underwear long
before we had heard of it, and you could tell by looking at his shoes
just what the rest of the school would be wearing in two years. That was
Petey all the way through. He was first and Fath