ege, and when I go back they'll pull the
grandfather clause on me and wheel me in early nights. I'm a back number
and I know the symptoms. When that young Sophomore told me the boys of
Eta Bita Pie had just spent twenty dollars apiece on a formal dance and
house party, I put up the same kind of a lecture to him that my father
gave me when I explained that we simply had to spend five dollars apiece
on our party, or belong in the fag end of things. And I suppose when my
father's crowd blew in a couple of dollars for a load of wood, his
father reminded him that when HE went to college they didn't coddle
themselves with fires in their dormitories. And I suppose that some day
this Sophomore will be telling his son that when he was in college a
simple little home-made aeroplane furnished amusement for twenty
fellows, and that they never dreamed of dropping over to the coast on
Saturdays for a dip in the surf in their private monoplanes. Oh, well,
it's human nature and natural law, I suppose. No use trying to put a
rock on the wheels of progress--and there's no use trying to ride the
darned thing either. It'll throw you every time.

When I went to college, Billy--loud pedal on that "I"--things were
different. We didn't spend our time fooling with gliders or blow
ourselves up monkeying with pragmatism. We attended strictly to
business. We were there for educational purposes and we had no time to
chase humming birds and chicken hawks. Why, the gasoline money of a
young collegian to-day would have paid my board bills then! We didn't
go to Japan on baseball tours, or lug telescopes around South America
when we ought to have been studying ethics. We lived simply and plainly.
There wasn't an automatic piano in a single frat house when I was in
college, and as for wasting our money on motion-picture shows and
taxi-cabs--nonsense. We'd have died first.

You see I'm getting into practice. Some day I'll have a son, I hope, and
he'll go back to Siwash. Just wait till he comes home at the end of the
first semester and tries to put across any bills for radium stickpins
and lookophonic conversations with the co-eds at Kiowa. I'll pull a
When-I-was-at-Siwash lecture on him that will make him feel like a
spider on a hot stove. If I've got to be a back number I want to romp
right back far enough to have some fun out of it. I'll make him sweat as
much lugging me up to date as I had to perspire in the old days to
illuminate things for Pa.

Af