wave back, doubtless saying something about "them
crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet
under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily
from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine
toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags.

From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as
surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic
golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the
streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a
plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby
hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a
villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling
shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations,
and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes.

Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you
know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart
lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip
upstairs under the protecting shadow of the associate coach, passing the
suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of
Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed
in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great
fresh specimen of the lustiest student-body in the world. You take his
hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to
the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how
glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if
this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for
the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our
best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the
beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow
like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling
unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a
quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.

Diemann found Ashley quiet in his room. The fullback was in splendid
fettle; the week at the Springs had done him a world of good. There was
no staleness about him now. It had helped him to be away from the
College, away from that excited crowd that sat on the bleachers and
watched him pl