ach
presenting him as an individual entirely under their auspices and for
whom they alone were responsible. Higgins, the sky-scraping Beta Phi,
whom he had met only that evening, took him arm in arm up to the
President's wife, and said:

"I want to introduce Mr. Haviland, a particular friend of mine. You will
be good to him for my sake, won't you?" And the lady with a twinkle in
her brown eyes, having recently promised to do the same for Jack Smith's
sake, pledged her favors anew to the bewildered Walt.

Haviland did not quite understand this attitude of open arms. His first
days in the Hall had not prepared him for it. He did not know that
because he was well-bred, well-dressed and athletically promising, he
was generally voted the prize Freshman of the year.

Then came the bids. There were only a few of the crowds that did not
spike him; three who were manifestly not of his style and two who never
presumed to enter the game until the others had made their winnings. All
sorts of methods had been used. The first bid came early; he was given
twenty-four hours to answer it, as "the Gamma Chi Tau never wait for a
man." The Freshman, however, getting riper in the sun of experience,
interpreted this to mean fear of competition, and so "declined with
assurances of continued friendship." There was a crowd who slapped him
on the back and called him "old man." Once he had been fresh enough to
tell them a story, and they had laughed so uproariously over it that he
was dreadfully embarrassed. The hospitality of another set seemed to
consist of a sly but systematic attempt to get him drunk for some
mysterious purpose of their own. He had put some of them to bed and felt
superior, which was fatal to their chances.

He had been to many varieties of dinner-tables. Some of them were
homelike; the talk at others had robbed him of appetite.

"What do you think of our crowd?" asked Roach, keenly, after a
particularly disagreeable meal at which there had been much coarseness
and a wreck of a tablecloth.

"They seem to me to be about the most congenial fellows I ever met,"
answered the disgusted but tactful Haviland, and Roach, going back to
his house, announced authoritatively that the boy was theirs if they
wanted him.

By this time he had learned the art of dodging invitations and remaining
non-committal when asked, "Well, Walt, are you going to do the right
thing?" Many a set, piled upon the beds in a fraternity room, sat up
la