s. No dinners at the houses. No
abductions. No big, tall talk about pledging to-night or staggering
through a twilight life to a frowzy-headed and unimportant old age in
some bum bunch. All done away with. Everything nice and orderly.
Freshman arrives. You take his name and address. Call on him, attended
by referees. Maintain a general temperature of not more than sixty-five
when you meet him on the campus. Buy him one ten-cent cigar during the
fall and introduce him to one girl--age, complexion and hypnotic power
to be carefully regulated by the rushing committee. Then you send him a
little engraved invitation to amalgamate with you; and when he answers,
per the self-addressed envelope inclosed, you are to love him like a
brother for the next three and a half years. Gee! how that makes me
ache!

Think of it! And at old Siwash, too!--Siwash, where we never considered
a pledge safe until we had him tied up in a back room, with our colors
on him and a guard around the house! That settles me. I've always
yearned to go back and cavort over the campus in the fall when college
opened; but not for me no more! Why, if I went back there and got into
the rushing game, first thing I knew they'd have me run up before a
pan-Hellenic council, charged with giving an eligible Freshman more than
two fingers when I shook hands with him; and I'd be ridden out of town
on a rail for rushing in an undignified manner.

Rushing? What's rushing? Oh, yes; I forgot that you never participated
in that delicious form of insanity known as a fall term in college.
Rushing is a cross between proposing to a girl and abducting a coyote.
Rushing a man for a frat is trying to make him believe that to belong to
it is joy and inspiration, and to belong to any other means misery and
an early tomb; that all the best men in college either belong to your
frat or couldn't get in; that you're the best fellows on earth, and that
you're crazy to have him, and that he is a coming Senator; that you
can't live without him; that the other gang can't appreciate him; that
you never ask men twice; that you don't care much for him anyway, and
that you are just as likely as not to withdraw the spike any minute if
you should happen to get tired of the cut of his trousers; that your
crowd can make him class president and the other crowds can make him
fine mausoleums; that you love him like real brothers and that he has
already bound himself in honor to pledge--and that if he