low,
a volunteer on the staff, and a man of singularly slight knowledge
of young men, very fond of showing his authority, especially at the
public examinations at the end of the term, had incurred the wrath
of the class and become the butt of all its practical jokes. Having
boasted one evening in society of the town that the students dared
not rebel against him, and the boast coming to their knowledge, not a
single student presented himself at the recitation next morning. The
next day he was greeted with such disorder that it was necessary to
suspend the exercises, and one of the most violent demonstrators
finished by throwing a huge wooden spoon at him, which, hitting him on
the head, ended the row. His public examinations were the most severe
we had to go through, and often quite needlessly so, in order to
impress the visitors with his own knowledge rather than with ours,
and as the end of a term drew near, I think in my last junior term,
a conspiracy was got up to put him _hors de combat_ for that
examination. It was decided to take him out of his room in the section
(he was section officer in my own section) and bring him into the
pine woods in the rear of the college, and there, unless he solemnly
promised to stay away from his class examination, to cut off his hair
and tar his head first, then crop his beard, and, if he was still
refractory, to strip him (it was midsummer) and tie him to a tree
and leave him all night, under the conviction that he would not show
himself at examination after that experience.

In the small hours, the conspirators, provided with a duplicate key to
the professor's door, made a stealthy attempt to open it, but found
his key on the inside and were unable to open the door, but woke the
victim, who, however, dared not raise an alarm. One of the smaller
students tried to climb in through the ventilator, but this was nailed
down, and then as a last resort the "smoking machine" was brought into
action. This was an "infernal machine," employed in hazing students
who had in any way offended the opinion of the class, especially by
indecorous subservience to the authorities or informing against their
fellow students. The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned.
The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a
nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and
the other was put through the keyhole of the door of the offender. In
the body of the pipe was