ed,
nothing marred our days. We could study or sing or dance at will. We
could even wrestle at times with none to molest or make us afraid.

My photograph shows the new suit which I had bought on my own
responsibility this time, but no camera could possibly catch the glow of
inward satisfaction which warmed my heart. It was a brown cassimere,
coat, trousers and vest all alike,--and the trousers fitted me!
Furthermore as I bought it without my father's help, my selection was
made for esthetic reasons without regard to durability or warmth. It was
mine--in the fullest sense--and when I next entered chapel I felt not
merely draped, but defended. I walked to my seat with confident
security, a well-dressed person. I had a "boughten" shirt also, two
boxes of paper cuffs, and two new ties, a black one for every day and a
white one for Sunday.

I don't know that any of the girls perceived my new suit, but I hoped
one or two of them did. The boys were quite outspoken in their approval
of it.

I had given up boots, also, for most of the townsmen wore shoes, thus
marking the decline of the military spirit. I never again owned a pair
of those man-killing top-boots--which were not only hard to get on and
off but pinched my toes, and interrupted the flow of my trouser-legs.
Thus one great era fades into another. The Jack-boot period was over,
the shoe, commonplace and comfortable, had won.

Our housekeeping was very simple. Each of us brought from home on Monday
morning a huge bag of doughnuts together with several loaves of bread,
and (with a milkman near at hand) our cooking remained rudimentary. We
did occasionally fry a steak and boil some potatoes, and I have a dim
memory of several disastrous attempts to make flapjacks out of flour and
sweet milk. However we never suffered from hunger as some of the other
fellows actually did.

Pretty Ethel Beebe comes into the record of this winter, like a quaint
illustration to an old-fashioned story, for she lived near us and went
to school along the same sidewalk. Burton was always saying, "Some day I
am going to brace up and ask Ethel to let me carry her books, and I'm
going to walk beside her right down Main Street." But he never did.
Ultimately I attained to that incredible boldness, but Burton only
followed along behind.

Ethel was a slender, smiling, brown-eyed girl with a keen appreciation
of the ridiculous, and I have no doubt she catalogued all our
peculiarities, for she alw